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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 


PRESENTED  BY 

PROF.  CHARLES  A.  KOFOID  AND 

MRS.  PRUDENCE  W.  KOFOID 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

Microsoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/birdspoetswithotOOburrrich 


Birds  and  Poets 


WITH  OTHER   PAPERS 


BY 


JOHN   BURROUGHS 

AUTHOR    OF   "\VAKE-ROBINV    AND    "  WINTER    SUNSHINE' 


NEW    YORK 

PUBLISHED   BY   HURD    AND   HOUGHTON 

Camfcrifcjrc  •  Cbe  Etoersttie  Press 

1877 


Copyright,  18h, 
Br  JOHN  BURROUGHS 


RIVERSIDE,    CAMBRIDGE  ! 

STEREOTYPED    AND    PRINTED     BY 

H.    0.    HOUGHTON   AND    COMPANY. 


Art* 


PKEFACE. 


I  have  deliberated  a  long  time  about  coupling 
some  of  my  sketches  of  out-door  nature  with  a  few 
chapters  of  a  more  purely  literary  character ;  and  as 
I  have  confided  to  my  reader  what  pleased  and  en- 
gaged me  beyond  my  four  walls,  to  show  him  what 
absorbs  and  delights  me  inside  those  walls  ;  especially 
as  I  have  aimed  to  bring  my  out-door  spirit  and 
method  within  and  still  look  upon  my  subject  with 
the  best  naturalist's  eye  I  could  command. 

I  hope,  therefore,  he  will  not  be  scared  away  when 
I  boldly  confront  him  in  the  latter  portions  of  my 
book  with  this  name  of  strange  portent,  Walt  Whit- 
man, for  I  assure  him  that  in  this  misjudged  man  he 
may  press  the  strongest  poetic  pulse  that  has  yet  beat 
in  America,  or  perhaps  in  modern  times. 

Then  these  chapters  are  a  proper  supplement  or 
continuation  of  my  themes,  and  their  analogy  in  liter- 
ature, because  in  them  we  shall  "follow  out  these 
lessons  of  the  earth  and  air,"  and  behold  their  appli- 
cation to  higher  matters. 

It  is  not  an  artificially  graded  path  strewn  with 


IV  PREFACE. 

roses  that  invites  us  in  this  part,  but  let  me  hope 
something  better,  a  rugged  trail  through  the  woods 
or  along  the  beach  where  we  shall  now  and  then  get 
a  whiff  of  natural  air,  or  a  glimpse  of  something  to 

"  Make  the  wild  blood  start 
In  its  mystic  springs." 

Esopus-on-Hudsox. 
March,  1877. 


CONTENTS. 

Birds  and  Poets ...      9 

Touches  op  Nature 51 

A  Bird  Medley 85 

April 109 

Spring  Poems 125 

Our  Rural  Divinity 135 

Before  Genius 161 

Before  Beauty 173 

Emerson 185 

The  Flight  op  the  Eagle 213 


BIRDS  AND  POETS. 


BIRDS  AND  POETS. 

"In  summer,  when  the  shawes  be  shene, 

And  leaves  be  large  and  long, 
It  is  full  merry  in  fair  forest 

To  hear  the  fowleV  song. 
The  wood-wele  sang,  and  wolde  not  cease, 

Sitting  upon  the  spray ; 
So  loud,  it  wakened  Robin  Hood 

In  the  greenwood  where  he  lay." 

It  might  almost  be  said  that  the  birds  are  all  birds 
of  the  poets  and  of  no  one  else,  because  it  is  only  the 
poetical  temperament  that  fully  responds  to  them. 
So  true  is  this,  that  all  the  great  ornithologists  — 
original  namers  and  biographers  of  the  birds  —  have 
been  poets  in  deed  if  not  in  word.  Audubon  is  a 
notable  case  in  point,  who,  if  he  had  not  the  tongue 
or  pen  of  the  poet,  certainly  had  the  eye  and  ear  and 
heart  —  "  the  fluid  and  attaching  character  "  —  and 
the  singleness  of  purpose,  the  enthusiasm,  the  un- 
worldliness,  the  love,  that  characterizes  the  true  and 
divine  race  of  bards. 

So  had  Wilson,  though  perhaps  not  in  as  large  a 
measure ;  yet  he  took  fire  as  only  a  poet  can.  While 
making  a  journey  on   foot  to  Philadelphia,  shortly 


10  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

after  landing  in  this  country,  he  caught  sight  of  the 
red-headed  woodpecker  flitting  among  the  trees  —  a 
bird  that  shows  like  a  tri-colored  scarf  among  the 
foliage,  —  and  it  so  kindled  his  enthusiasm  that  his 
life  was  devoted  to  the  pursuit  of  the  birds  from  that 
day.  It  was  a  lucky  hit.  Wilson  had  already  set 
up  as  a  poet  in  Scotland,  and  was  still  fermenting 
when  the  bird  met  his  eye  and  suggested  to  his  soul 
a  new  outlet  for  its  enthusiasm. 

The  very  idea  of  a  bird  is  a  symbol  and  a  sugges- 
tion to  the  poet.  A  bird  seems  to  be  at  the  top  of 
the  scale,  so  vehement  and  intense  is  his  life  —  large 
brained,  large  lunged,  hot,  ecstatic,  his  frame  charged 
with  buoyancy  and  his  heart  with  song.  The  beauti- 
ful vagabonds,  endowed  with  every  grace,  masters  of 
all  climes,  and  knowing  no  bounds,  —  how  many 
human  aspirations  are  realized  in  their  free,  holiday- 
lives  —  and  how  many  suggestions  to  the  poet  in  their 
flight  and  song ! 

Indeed,  is  not  the  bird  the  original  type  and  teacher 
of  the  poet,  and  do  we  not  demand  of  the  human  lark 
or  thrush  that  he  "  shake  out  his  carols  "  in  the  same 
free  and  spontaneous  manner  as  his  winged  proto- 
type? Kingsley  has  shown  how  surely  the  old  min- 
nesingers and  early  ballad-writers  have  learned  of  the 
birds,  taking  their  key-note  from  the  blackbird,  or 
the  wood-lark,  or  the  throstle,  and  giving  utterance  to 
a  melody  as  simple  and  unstudied.  Such  things  as 
the  following  were  surely  caught  from  the  fields  or 
the  woods :  — 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  11 

u  She  sat  down  below  a  thorn, 
Fine  flowers  in  the  valley, 
And  there  has  she  her  sweet  babe  born, 
And  the  green  leaves  they  grow  rarely." 

Or  the  best  lyric  pieces,  how  like  they  are  to  certain 
bird-songs,  —  clear,  ringing,  ecstatic,  and  suggesting 
that  challenge  and  triumph  which  the  outpouring  of 
the  male  bird  contains.  (Is  not  the  genuine  singing, 
lyrical  quality  essentially  masculine?)  Keats  and 
Shelley,  perhaps,  more  notably  than  any  other  Eng- 
lish poets,  have  the  bird-organization  and  the  pierc- 
ing wild-bird  cry.  This  of  course  is  not  saying  that 
they  are  the  greatest  poets,  but  that  they  have  pre- 
eminently the  sharp  semi-tones  of  the  sparrows  and 
larks. 

But  when  the  general  reader  thinks  of  the  birds 
of  the  poets  he  very  naturally  calls  to  mind  the  re- 
nowned birds,  the  lark  and  nightingale,  01d: World 
melodists,  embalmed  in  Old- World  poetry,  but  occa- 
sionally appearing  on  these  shores,  transported  in  the 
verse  of  some  callow  singer. 

The  very  oldest  poets,  the  towering  antique  bards, 
seem  to  make  little  mention  of  the  song-birds.  They 
loved  better  the  soaring,  swooping  birds  of  prey,  the 
eagle,  the  ominous  birds,  the  vultures,  the  storks,  and 
cranes,  or  the  clamorous  sea-bird  sand  the  scream- 
ing hawks.  These  suited  better  the  rugged,  warlike 
character  of  the  times  and  the  simple,  powerful  souls 
of  the  singers  themselves.  Homer  must  have  heard 
the  twittering  of  the  swallows,  the  cry  of  the  plover, 


12  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

the  voice  of  the  turtle,  and  the  warble  of  the  night- 
ingale ;  but  they  were  not  adequate  symbols  to  ex- 
press what  he  felt  or  to  adorn  his  theme.  JEschylus 
saw  in  the  eagle  "  the  dog  of  Jove,"  and  his  verse 
cuts  like  a  sword  with  such  a  conception. 

It  is  not  because  the  old  bards  were  less  as  poets, 
but  that  they  were  more  as  men.  To  strong,  suscep- 
tible characters  the  music  of  nature  is  not  confined  to 
sweet  sounds.  The  defiant  scream  of  the  hawk  cir- 
cling aloft,  the  wild  whinney  of  the  loon,  the  whoop- 
ing of  the  crane,  the  booming  of  the  bittern,  the  vul- 
pine bark  of  the  eagle,  the  loud  trumpeting  of  the 
migratory  geese  sounding  down  out  of  the  midnight 
sky ;  or  by  the  sea-shore,  the  coast  of  New  Jersey  or 
Long  Island,  the  wild  crooning  of  the  flocks  of  gulls, 
repeated,  continued  by  the  hour,  swirling  sharp  and 
shrill,  rising  and  falling  like  the  wind  in  a  storm,  as 
they  circle  above  the  beach,  or  dip  to  the  dash  of  the 
waves  —  are  much  more  welcome  in  certain  moods 
than  any  and  all  mere  bird-melodies,  in  keeping  as 
they  are  with  the  shaggy  and  untamed  features  of 
ocean  and  woods,  and  suggesting  something  like  the 
Richard  Wagner  music  in  the  ornithological  orchestra. 

"  Nor  these  alone  whose  notes 
Nice-fingered  art  must  emulate  in  vain, 
But  cawing  rooks,  and  kites  that  swim  sublime 
In  still  repeated  circles,  screaming  loud, 
The  jay,  the  pie,  and  even  the  boding  owl, 
That  hails  the  rising  moon,  have  charms  for  me." — 

says   Cowper.     "I  never  hear,"  says  Burns   in  one 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  13 

of  his  letters,  "  the  loud  solitary  whistle  of  the  curlew 
in  a  summer  noon,  or  the  wild  mixing  cadence  of  a 
troop  of  gray  plovers  in  an  autumnal  morning,  with- 
out feeling  an  elevation  of  soul  like  the  enthusiasm 
of  devotion  or  poetry." 

Even  the  Greek  minor  poets,  the  swarm  of  them 
that  are  represented  in  the  Greek  Anthology,  rarely 
make  affectionate  mention  of  the  birds,  except  per- 
haps Sappho,  whom  Ben  Jonson  makes  speak  of 
the  nightingale  as  — 

"  The  dear  glad  angel  of  the  spring." 

The  cicada,  the  locust,  and  the  grasshopper,  are 
often  referred  to,  but  rarely  by  name  any  of  the  com- 
mon birds.  That  Greek  grasshopper  must  have  been 
a  wonderful  creature.  He  was  a  sacred  object  in 
Greece,  and  is  spoken  of  by  the  poets  as  a  charming 
songster.  What  we  would  say  of  birds  the  Greek 
said  of  this  favorite  insect.  When  Socrates  and 
Phaedrus  came  to  the  fountain  shaded  by  the  plane- 
tree,  where  they  had  their  famous  discourse,  Socrates 
said,  "  Observe  the  freshness  of  the  spot,  how  charm- 
ing and  very  delightful  it  is,  and  how  summer-like 
and  shrill  it  sounds  from  the  choir  of  grasshoppers." 
One  of  the  poets  in  the  Anthology  finds  a  grasshop- 
per struggling  in  a  spider's  web,  which  he  releases 
with  the  words  :  — 

"  Go  safe  and  free  with  your  sweet  voice  of  song." 

Another  one  makes  the  insect  say  to  a  rustic  who 
had  captured  him  :  — 


14  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

M  Me,  the  Nymphs'  wayside  minstrel  whose  sweet  note 
O'er  sultry  hill  is  heard,  and  shady  grove  to  float." 

Still  another  sings  how  a  grasshopper  took  the  place 
of  a  broken  string  on  his  lyre,  and  "  filled  the  cadence 
due." 

"  For  while  six  chords  beneath  my  fingers  cried, 
He  with  his  tuneful  voice  the  seventh  supplied; 
The  mid-day  songster  of  the  mountain  set 
His  pastoral  ditty  to  my  canzonet; 
And  when  he  sang,  his  modulated  throat 
Accorded  with  the  lifeless  string  I  smote." 

While  we  are  trying  to  introduce  the  lark  in  this 
country,  why  not  try  this  Pindaric  grasshopper  also  ? 
It  is  to  the  literary  poets  and  to  the  minstrels  of  a 
softer  age  that  we  must  look  for  special  mention  of 
the  song-birds  and  for  poetical  rhapsodies  upon  them. 
The  nightingale  is  the  most  general  favorite,  and 
nearly  all  the  more  noted  English  poets  have  sung 
her  praises.  To  the  melancholy  poet  she  is  melan- 
choly, and  to  the  cheerful  she  is  cheerful.  Shakes- 
peare in  one  of  his  sonnets  speaks  of  her  song  as 
mournful,  while  Martial  calls  her  the  "  most  garru- 
lous" of  birds.     Milton  san^ — 

o 

"  Sweet,  that  shunn'st  the  noise  of  folly, 
Most  musical,  most  melancholy, 
Thee,  chantress,  oft  the  woods  among 
I  woo,  to  hear  thy  evening  song." 

To  Wordsworth  she  told  another  story :  — 

"  0  nightingale!  thou  surely  art 
A  creature  of  ebullient  heart; 
These  notes  of  thine  —  they  pierce  and  pierce; 
Tumultuous  harmony  and  fierce ! 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  15 

Thou  sing'st  as  if  the  god  of  wine 

Had  helped  thee  to  a  valentine; 

A  song  in  mockery  and  despite 

Of  shades,  and  dews,  and  silent  night, 

And  steady  bliss,  and  all  the  loves 

Now  sleeping  in  these  peaceful  groves." 

In  a  like  vein  Coleridge  sang :  — 

"  'T  is  the  merry  nightingale 
That  crowds  and  hurries  and  precipitates 
With  fast,  thick  warble  his  delicious  notes." 

Keats's  poem  on  the  nightingale  is  doubtless  more 
in  the  spirit  of  the  bird's  strain  than  any  other.  It 
is  less  a  description  of  the  song  and  more  the  song 
itself.     Hood  called  the  nightingale 

"  The  sweet  and  plaintive  Sappho  of  the  dell." 

I  mention  the  nightingale  only  to  point  my  remarks 
upon  its  American  rival,  the  famous  mocking-bird  of 
the  Southern  States,  which  is  also  a  nightingale  —  a 
night-singer — and  which  no  doubt  excels  the  Old- 
World  bird  in  the  variety  and  compass  of  its  powers. 
The  two  birds  belong  to  totally  distinct  families,  there 
being  no  American  species  which  answers  to  the  Eu- 
ropean nightingale,  as  there  are  that  answer  to  the 
robin,  the  cuckoo,  the  blackbird,  and  numerous  others. 
Philomel  has  the  color,  manners,  and  habits  of  a  thrush 
—  our  hermit-thrush — but  it  is  not  a  thrush  at  all, 
but  a  warbler.  I  gather  from  the  books  that  its  song 
is  protracted  and  full  rather  than  melodious,  —  a  ca- 
pricious, long-continued  warble,  doubling  and  redoub- 
ling, rising  and  falling,  issuing  from  the  groves  and 


16  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

the  great  gardens,  and  associated  in  the  minds  of  the 
poets  with  love  and  moonlight  and  the  privacy  of  se- 
questered walks.  All  our  sympathies  and  attractions 
are  with  the  bird,  and  we  do  not  forget  that  Arabia 
and  Persia  are  there  back  of  its  song. 

Our  nightingale  has  mainly  the  reputation  of  the 
caged  bird,  and  is  famed  mostly  for  its  powers  of 
mimicry,  which  are  truly  wonderful,  enabling  the  bird 
to  exactly  reproduce  and  even  improve  upon  the  notes 
of  almost  any  other  songster.  But  in  a  state  of  free- 
dom it  has  a  song  of  its  own  which  is  infinitely  rich 
and  various.  It  is  a  garrulous  polyglot  when  it 
chooses  to  be,  and  there  is  a  dash  of  the  clown  and 
the  buffoon  in  its  nature  which  too  often  flavors  its 
whole  performance,  especially  in  captivity ;  but  in  its 
native  haunts,  and  when  its  love-passion  is  upon  it, 
the  serious  and  even  grand  side  of  its  character  comes 
out.  In  Alabama  and  Florida  its  song  may  be  heard 
all  through  the  sultry  summer  night,  at  times  low  and 
plaintive,  then  full  and  strong.  A  friend  of  Thoreau 
and  a  careful  observer,  who  has  resided  in  Florida, 
tells  me  that  this  bird  is  a  much  more  marvelous 
singer  than  it  has  the  credit  of  being.  He  describes 
a  habit  it  has  of  singing  on  the  wing  on  moonlight 
nights,  that  would  be  worth  going  South  to  hear. 
Starting  from  a  low  bush,  it  mounts  in  the  air  and 
continues  its  flight  apparently  to  an  altitude  of  sev- 
eral hundred  feet,  remaining  on  the  wing  a  number 
of  minutes,  and  pouring  out  its  song  with  the  ut- 
most clearness   and  abandon  —  a  slowly  rising  mu- 


BIRDS  AND   POETS.  17 

sical  rocket  that  fills  the  night  air  with  harmonious 
sounds.  Here  are  both  the  lark  and  nightingale  in 
one ;  and  if  poets  were  as  plentiful  down  South  as 
they  are  in  New  England,  we  should  have  heard  of 
this  song  long  ago,  and  had  it  celebrated  in  appropri- 
ate verse.  But  so  far  only  one  Southern  poet,  Wilde, 
has  accredited  the  bird  this  song.  This  he  has  done 
in  the  following  admirable  sonnet :  — 

TO  THE  MOCKING-BIRD. 

Winged  mimic  of  the  woods !  thou  motley  fool 

Who  shall  thy  gay  buffoonery  describe  ? 
Thine  ever-ready  notes  of  ridicule 

Pursue  thy  fellows  still  with  jest  and  gibe. 
Wit — sophist  —  songster — Yorick  of  thy  tribe, 

Thou  sportive  satirist  of  Nature's  school, 
To  thee  the  palm  of  scoffing  we  ascribe, 

Arch  scoffer,  and  mad  Abbot  of  Misrule ! 
For  such  thou  art  by  day  —  but  all  night  long 

Thou  pour'st  a  soft,  sweet,  pensive,  solemn  strain, 
As  if  thou  didst  in  this,  thy  moonlight  song, 

Like  to  the  melancholy  Jacques,  complain, 
Musing  on  falsehood,  violence,  and  wrong, 

And  sighing  for  thy  motley  coat  again. 

Aside  from  this  sonnet,  the  mocking-bird  has  got 
into  poetical  literature,  so  far  as  I  know,  in  only  one 
notable  instance,  and  that  in  the  page  of  a  poet  where 
we  would  least  expect  to  find  him  —  a  bard  who  ha- 
bitually bends  his  ear  only  to  the  musical  surge  and 
rhythmus  of  total  nature,  and  is  as  little  wont  to  turn 
aside  for  any  special  beauties  or  points  as  the  most  aus- 
tere of  the  ancient  masters.  I  refer  to  Walt  Whit- 
man's "  Out  of  the  cradle  endlessly  rocking,"  in  which 
2 


18  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

the  mocking-bird  plays  a  part.  The  poet's  treatment 
of  the  bird  is  entirely  ideal  and  eminently  character- 
istic. That  is  to  say,  it  is  altogether  poetical  and  not 
at  all  ornithological ;  yet  it  contains  a  rendering  or 
free  translation  of  a  bird-song  —  the  nocturn  of  the 
mocking-bird,  singing  and  calling  through  the  night 
for  its  lost  mate  —  that  I  consider  quite  unmatched  in 
our  literature. 

Once,  Paumanok, 
When  the  snows  had  melted,  and  the  Fifth-month  grass  was 

growing, 
Up  this  sea-shore,  in  some  briers, 
Two  guests  from  Alabama  —  two  together, 
And  their  nest,  and  four  light-green  eggs,  spotted  with  brown, 
And  every  day  the  he-bird,  to  and  fro,  near  at  hand, 
And  every  day  the  she-bird,  crouched  on  her  nest,  silent,  with  bright 

eyes, 
And  every  day  I,  a  curious  boy,  never  too  close,  never  disturbing 

them, 
Cautiously  peering,  absorbing,  translating. 

Shine!  Shine!  Shine! 
Pour  down  your  warmth,  great  Sun  ! 
While  we  bask  —  we  two  together. 

Two  together! 
Winds  blow  South,  or  winds  blow  North, 
Day  come  white,  or  night  come  black, 
Home,  or  rivers  and  mountains  from  home, 
Singing  all  time,  minding  no  time, 
If  we  two  but  keep  together. 

Till  of  a  sudden, 
Maybe  killed,  unknown  to  her  mate, 
One  forenoon  the  she-bird  crouched  not  on  the  nest, 
Nor  returned  that  afternoon,  nor  the  next, 
Nor  ever  appeared  again. 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  19 

And  thenceforward,  all  summer,  in  the  sound  of  the  sea, 
And  at  night,  under  the  full  of  the  moon,  in  calmer  weather, 
Over  the  hoarse  surging  of  the  sea, 
Or  flitting  from  brier  to  brier  by  day, 
I  saw,  I  heard  at  intervals,  the  remaining  one,  the  he-bird, 
The  solitary  guest  from  Alabama. 

Blow  !  blow  !  blow  ! 
Blow  up,  sea-winds,  along  Paumanok,s  shore  ! 
I  wait  and  I  wait,  till  you  blow  my  mate  to  me. 

Yes,  when  the  stars  glistened, 
All  night  long,  on  the  prong  of  a  moss-scalloped  stake, 
Down,  almost  amid  the  slapping  waves, 
Sat  the  lone  singer,  wonderful,  causing  tears. 

He  called  on  his  mate: 
He  poured  forth  the  meanings  which  I,  of  all  men,  know. 


Soothe  !  soothe  !  soothe  ! 
Close  on  its  wave  soothes  the  wave  behind, 
And  again  another  behind,  embracing  and  lapping,   every  one 

close, 
But  my  love  soothes  not  me,  not  me. 

Low  hangs  the  moon  —  it  rose  late. 
Oh  it  is  lagging  —  oh  I  think  it  is  heavy  with  love,  with  love. 

Oh  madly  the  sea  pushes,  pushes  upon  the  land, 
With  love  —  with  love. 

0  night!   do  I  not  see  my  love  fluttering  out  there  among  the 
breakers ? 
What  is  that  little  black  thing  I  see  there  in  the  white  t 

Loud!  loud!  loud! 
Loud  I  call  to  you,  my  love  ! 
High  and  clear  I  shoot  my  voice  over  the  waves ; 
Surely  you  must  know  who  is  here,  is  here; 
You  must  know  who  I  am,  my  love. 


20  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

Low  hanging  moon  ! 
What  is  that  dusky  spot  in  your  brown  yellow  ? 
Oh  it  is  the  shape,  the  shape  of  my  mate  ! 
0  moon,  do  not  keep  her  from  me  any  longer. 

Land  !  land  !  0  land  I 
Whichever  way  I  turn,  oh  I  think  you  could  give  my  mate  back 

again,  if  you  only  would  ; 
For  I  am  almost  sure  I  see  her  dimly  whichever  way  I  look. 

0  rising  stars  ! 
Perhaps  the  one  I  want  so  much  will  rise,  will  rise  with  some  of 
you. 

0  throat !  0  trembling  throat ! 
Sound  clearer  through  the  atmosphere! 
Pierce  the  woods,  the  earth; 
Somewhere  listening  to  catch  you,  must  be  the  one  I  want. 

Shake  out,  carols  I 
Solitary  here  —  the  night's  carols! 
Carols  of  lonesome  love!  Death's  carols! 
Carols  under  that  lagging,  yellow,  waning  moon  ! 
Oh,  under  that  moon,  where  she  droops  almost  down  into  the  sea  ! 
0  reckless,  despairing  carols. 

But  soft  !  sink  low  ; 
Soft  !  let  me  just  murmur  ; 

And  do  you  wait  a  moment,  you  husky-noised  sea ; 
For  somewhere  I  believe  I  heard  my  mate  responding  to  me, 
So  faint  —  /  must  be  still,  be  still  to  listen  ; 
But  not  altogether  still,  for  then  she  might  not  come  immediately  to 


Either,  my  love! 
Here  I  am!  Here! 

With  this  just-sustained  note  I  announce  myself  to  you  ; 
This  gentle  call  is  for  you,  my  love,  for  you. 

Do  not  be  decoyed  elsewhere  ! 
That  is  the  whistle  of  the  wind  —  it  is  not  my  voice ; 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  21 

That  is  the  fluttering,  the  fluttering  of  the  spray; 
Those  are  the  shadows  of  leaves. 

0  darkness  !    Oh  in  vain  ! 
Oh  I  am  very  sick  and  sorrowful. 

The  bird  that  occupies  the  second  place  to  the 
nightingale  in  British  poetical  literature  is  the  sky- 
lark, a  pastoral  bird  as  the  Philomel  is  an  arboreal,  — 
a  creature  of  light  and  air  and  motion,  the  compan- 
ion of  the  plowman,  the  shepherd,  the  harvester,  — 
whose  nest  is  in  the  stubble  and  whose  tryst  is  in  the 
clouds.  Its  life  affords  that  kind  of  contrast  which 
the  imagination  loves  —  one  moment  a  plain  pedes- 
trian-bird, hardly  distinguishable  from  the  ground, 
the  next  a  soaring,  untiring  songster,  reveling  in  the 
upper  air,  challenging  the  eye  to  follow  him  and  the 
ear  to  separate  his  notes. 

The  lark's  song  is  not  especially  melodious,  but 
lithesome,  sibilant,  and  unceasing.  Its  type  is  the 
grass,  where  the  bird  makes  its  home,  abounding, 
multitudinous,  the  notes  nearly  all  alike  and  all  in 
the  same  key,  but  rapid,  swarming,  prodigal,  shower- 
ing down  as  thick  and  fast  as  drops  of  rain  in  a  sum- 
mer shower. 

Many  noted  poets  have  sung  the  praises  of  the 
lark  or  been  kindled  by  his  example.  Shelley's  ode, 
and  Wordsworth's  "  To  a  Skylark,"  are  well  known 
to  all  readers  of  poetry,  while  every  school-boy  will 
recall  Hogg's  poem,  beginning  — 

"  Bird  of  the  wilderness, 
Blithesome  and  cumberless, 
Sweet  be  thy  matin  o'er  moorland  and  lea! 


22  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

Emblem  of  happiness, 
Blest  is  thy  dwelling  place  — 
Oh  to  abide  in  the  desert  with  thee !  " 

I  heard  of  an  enthusiastic  American  who  went 
about  English  fields  hunting  a  lark  with  Shelley's 
poem  in  his  hand,  thinking  no  doubt  to  use  it  as  a 
kind  of  guide-book  to  the  intricacies  and  harmonies 
of  the  song.  He  reported  not  having  heard  any 
larks,  though  I  have  little  doubt  they  were  soaring 
and  singing  about  him  all  the  time,  though  of  course 
they  did  not  sing  to  his  ear  the  song  that  Shelley 
heard.  The  poets  are  the  best  natural  historians, 
only  you  must  know  how  to  read  them.  They  trans- 
late the  facts  largely  and  freely.  A  celebrated  lady 
once  said  to  Turner,  "I  confess,  I  cannot  see  in  nature 
what  you  do."  "  Ah,  madam,"  said  the  complacent 
artist,  "  don't  you  wish  you  could !  " 

Shelley's  poem  is  perhaps  better  known  and  has  a 
higher  reputation  among  literary  folk  than  Words- 
worth's ;  it  is  more  lyrical  and  lark-like ;  but  it  is 
needlessly  long,  though  no  longer  than  the  lark's  song 
itself,  but  the  lark  can't  help  it  and  Shelley  can.  I 
quote  only  a  few  stanzas  :  — 

"In  the  golden  lightning 
Of  the  sunken  sun, 
O'er  which  clouds  are  brightning, 
Thou  dost  float  and  run, 
Like  an  unbodied  joy  whose  race  is  just  begun. 

"  The  pale  purple  even 
Melts  around  thy  flight ; 
Like  a  star  of  heaven, 
In  the  broad  daylight 
Thou  art  unseen,  but  yet  I  hear  thy  shrill  delight. 


BIRDS   AND    POETS.  23 

Keen  as  are  the  arrows 
Of  that  silver  sphere, 
Whose  intense  lamp  narrows 
In  the  white  dawn  clear, 
Until  we  hardly  see,  but  feel  that  it  is  there. 

"  All  the  earth  and  air 
With  thy  voice  is  loud, 
As,  when  night  is  bare, 
From  one  lonely  cloud 
The  moon  rains  out  her  beams,  and  heaven  is  overflowed." 

Wordsworth  has  written  two  poems  upon  the  lark, 
in  one  of  which  he  calls  the  bird  "  pilgrim  of  the 
sky."  This  is  the  one  quoted  by  Emerson  in  "  Par- 
nassus."    Here  is  the  concluding  stanza :  — 

"  Leave  to  the  nightingale  her  shady  wood; 
A  privacy  of  glorious  light  is  thine, 
Whence  thou  dost  pour  upon  the  world  a  flood 
Of  harmony,  with  instinct  more  divine  ; 
Type  of  the  wise,  who  soar,  but  never  roam, 
True  to  the  kindred  points  of  heaven  and  home." 

The  other  poem  I  give  entire:  — 

"  Up  with  me  !  up  with  me,  into  the  clouds  ! 

For  thy  song,  lark,  is  strong ; 
Up  with  me,  up  with  me,  into  the  clouds  1 

Singing,  singing, 
With  all  the  heavens  about  thee  ringing, 

Lift  me,  guide  me  till  I  find 
That  spot  which  seems  so  to  thy  mind  I 

"  I  have  walked  through  wildernesses  dreary, 

And  to-day  my  heart  is  weary ; 
Had  I  now  the  wings  of  a  fairy 

Up  to  thee  would  I  fly. 
There  is  madness  about  thee,  and  joy  divine 

In  that  song  of  thine; 


24  BIRDS  AKD  POETS. 

Up  with  me,  up  with  me  high  and  high 
To  thy  banqueting-place  in  the  sky! 

Joyous  as  morning, 
Thou  art  laughing  and  scorning, 
Thou  hast  a  nest  for  thy  love  and  thy  rest ; 
And,  though  little  troubled  with  sloth, 
Drunken  lark !  thou  wouldst  be  loth 

"  "R>  be  such  a  traveler  as  I. 
Happy,  happy  liver ! 
"With  a  soul  as  strong  as  a  mountain-river, 
Pouring  out  praise  to  th'  Almighty  Giver, 
Joy  and  jollity  be  with  us  both ! 
Hearing  thee,  or  else  some  other, 

As  merry  a  brother, 
I  on  earth  will  go  plodding  on, 
By  myself,  cheerfully,  till  the  day  is  done."' 

But  better  than  either  —  better  and  more  than  a 
hundred  pages  —  is  Shakespeare's  simple  line  — 
11  Hark,  hark,  the  lark  at  heaven's  gate  sings," 

or  John  Lyly's,  his  contemporary, 

"  Who  is  't  now  we  hear? 
None  but  the  lark  so  shrill  and  clear; 
Now  at  heaven's  gate  she  claps  her  wings, 
The  morn  not  waking  till  she  sings." 

TVe  have  no  well-known  pastoral  bird  in  the  East- 
ern States  that  answers  to  the  skylark.  The  Ameri- 
can pipit  or  titlark  and  the  shore-lark,  both  birds  of 
the  far  North,  and  seen  in  the  States  only  in  fall  and 
winter,  belong  to  this  species,  and  are  said  to  sing  on 
the  wing  in  a  similar  strain.  Common  enough  in  our 
woods  are  two  birds  that  have  many  of  the  habits 
and  manners  of  the  lark  —  the  water-thrush  and  the 
golden-crowned  thrush,  or  oven-bird.     They  are  both 


BIRDS  AND   POETS.  25 

walkers,  and  the  latter  frequently  sings  on  the  wing 
up  aloft  after  the  manner  of  the  lark.  Starting  from 
its  low  perch,  it  rises  in  a  spiral  flight  far  above  the 
tallest  trees,  and  breaks  out  in  a  clear,  ringing,  ec- 
static song,  sweeter  and  more  richly  modulated  than 
the  skylark's,  but  brief,  ceasing  almost  before  you 
have  noticed  it;  whereas  the  skylark  goes  singing 
away  after  you  have  forgotten  him  and  returned  to 
him  half  a  dozen  times. 

But  in  the  West,  in  Dakota,  and  along  the  Platte 
and  Yellowstone  rivers,  it  seems  we  have  a  genuine 
skylark  (Sprague's  lark),  an  excelsior  songster,  that 
from  far  up  in  the  transparent  blue  rains  down  its 
notes  for  many  minutes  together.  It  is  probably  a 
lineal  descendant  of  the  European  species,  and  is,  no 
doubt,  destined  to  figure  in  the  future  poetical  litera- 
ture of  the  Yellowstone. 

Throughout  the  northern  and  eastern  parts  of  the 
Union  the  lark  would  find  a  dangerous  rival  in  the 
bobolink,  a  bird  that  has  no  European  prototype,  and 
no  near  relatives  anywhere  —  standing  quite  alone, 
unique,  and,  in  the  qualities  of  hilarity  and  musical 
tintinnabulation,  with  a  song  unequaled.  He  has 
already  a  secure  place  in  general  literature,  having 
been  laureated  by  a  no  less  poet  than  Bryant,  and  in- 
vested with  a  lasting  human  charm  in  the  sunny  page 
of  Irving,  —  and  is  the  only  one  of  our  songsters,  I 
believe,  the  mocking-bird  cannot  parody  or  imitate. 
He  affords  the  most  marked  example  of  exuberant 
pride,  and  a  glad,  rollicking,  holiday  spirit  that  can 


26  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

be  seen  among  our  birds.  Every  note  expresses  com- 
placency and  glee.  He  is  a  beau  of  the  first  pattern, 
and,  unlike  any  other  bird  of  my  acquaintance,  pushes 
his  gallantry  to  the  point  of  wheeling  gayly  into  the 
train  of  every  female  that  comes  along,  even  after  the 
season  of  courtship  is  over  and  the  matches  all  set- 
tled ;  and  when  she  leads  him  on  too  wild  a  chase,  he 
turnes  lightly  about  and  breaks  out  with  a  song  that 
is  precisely  analogous  to  a  burst  of  gay  and  self-satis- 
fied laughter,  as  much  as  to  say,  "  Ha  I  ha  !  ha  !  I 
must  have  my  fun,  Miss  Silverthimble,  thimble,  thimble, 
if  I  break  every  heart  in  the  meadow,  see,  see,  see  !  "  . 

At  the  approach  of  the  breeding  season  the  bobo- 
link undergoes  a  complete  change ;  his  form  changes, 
his  color  changes,  his  flight  changes.  From  mottled 
brown  or  brindle  he  becomes  black  and  white,  earn- 
ing, in  some  localities,  the  shocking  name  of  "  skunk 
bird ; "  his  small,  compact  form  becomes  broad  and 
conspicuous,  and  his  ordinary  flight  is  laid  aside  for  a 
mincing,  affected  gait,  in  which  he  seems  to  use  only 
the  very  tips  of  his  wings.  It  is  very  noticeable 
what  a  contrast  he  presents  to  his  mate  at  this  season, 
not  only  in  color  but  in  manners,  she  being  as  shy 
and  retiring  as  he  is  forward  and  hilarious.  Indeed, 
she  seems  disagreeably  serious  and  indisposed  to  any 
fun  or  jollity,  skurrying  away  at  his  approach,  and 
apparently  annoyed  at  every  endearing  word  and 
look.  It  is  surprising  that  all  this  parade  of  plumage 
and  tinkling  of  cymbals  should  be  gone  through  with 
and  persisted  in  to  please  a  creature  so  coldly  indif- 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  27 

ferent  as  she  really  seems  to  be.  If  Robert  O'  Lin- 
coln has  been  stimulated  into  acquiring  this  holiday 
uniform  and  this  musical  gift  by  the  approbation  of 
Mrs.  Robert,  as  Darwin,  with  his  sexual  selection 
principle  would  have  us  believe,  then  there  must  have 
been  a  time  when  the  females  of  this  tribe  were  not 
quite  so  chary  of  their  favors  as  they  are  now.  In- 
deed, I  never  knew  a  female  bird  of  any  kind  that 
did  not  appear  utterly  indifferent  to  the  charms  of 
voice  and  plumage  that  the  male  birds  are  so  fond  of 
displaying.  But  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  the 
males  think  only  of  themselves  and  of  outshining  each 
other,  and  not  at  all  of  the  approbation  of  their  mates, 
as,  in  an  analogous  case  in  a  higher  species,  it  is  well 
known  who  the  females  dress  for  and  whom  they  want 
to  kill  with  envy  ! 

I  know  of  no  other  song-bird  that  expresses  so 
much  self-consciousness  and  vanity,  and  comes  so  near 
being  an  ornithological  coxcomb.  The  red-bird,  the 
yellow-bird,  the  indigo-bird,  the  oriole,  the  cardinal 
grosbeak  and  others,  all  birds  of  brilliant  plumage 
and  musical  ability,  seem  quite  unconscious  of  self, 
and  neither  by  tone  nor  act  challenge  the  admiration 
of  the  beholder. 

By  the  time  the  bobolink  reaches  the  Potomac,  in 
September,  he  has  degenerated  into  a  game-bird  that 
is  slaughtered  by  tens  of  thousands  in  the  marshes. 
I  think  the  prospects  now  are  of  his  gradual  exter- 
mination, as  gunners  and  sportsmen  are  clearly  on 
the  increase,  while  the  limit  of  the  bird's  productivity 


28  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

in  the  North  has  no  doubt  been  reached  long  ago. 
There  are  no  more  meadows  to  be  added  to  his  do- 
main there,  while  he  is  being  waylaid  and  cut  off 
more  and  more  on  his  return  to  the  South.  It  is 
gourmand  eat  gourmand,  until  in  half  a  century  more 
I  expect  the  blithest  and  merriest  of  our  meadow 
songsters  will  have  disappeared  before  the  rapacity 
of  human  throats. 

But  the  poets  have  had  a  shot  at  him  in  good  time, 
and  have  preserved  some  of  his  traits.  Bryant's 
poem  on  this  subject  does  not  compare  with  his  lines 
"  To  a  Water-fowl,"  —  a  subject  so  well  suited  to 
the  peculiar,  simple,  and  deliberate  motion  of  his 
mind ;  at  the  same  time  it  is  fit  that  the  poet  who 
sings  of  "  The  Planting  of  the  Apple-tree,"  should 
render  into  words  the  song  of  "  Robert  of  Lincoln." 
I  subjoin  a  few  stanzas  :  — 

ROBERT  OF  LINCOLN". 

Merrily  swinging  on  brier  and  weed, 
Near  to  the  nest  of  his  little  dame, 
Over  the  mountain-side  or  mead, 
Robert  of  Lincoln  is  telling  his  name  : 
Bob-o'-link,  bob-o'-link, 
Spink,  spank,  spink: 
Snug  and  safe  is  that  nest  of  ours, 
Hidden  among  the  summer  flowers. 
Chee,  chee,  chee. 

Robert  of  Lincoln  is  gayly  drest, 

"Wearing  a  bright  black  wedding-coat, 
White  are  his  shoulders  and  white  his  crest, 
Hear  him  call  in  his  merry  note: 
Bob-o'-link,  bob-o'-link, 
Spink,  spank,  spink : 


BIRDS  AND   POETS.  29 

Look  what  a  nice  new  coat  is  mine, 
Sure  there  was  never  a  bird  so  fine. 
Chee,  chee,  chee. 

Robert  of  Lincoln's  Quaker  wife, 

Pretty  and  quiet,  with  plain  brown  wings, 
Passing  at  home  a  patient  life, 
Broods  in  the  grass  while  her  husband  sings : 
Bob-o'-link,  bob-o'-link, 
Spink,  spank,  spink  : 
Brood,  kind  creature  ;  you  need  not  fear 
Thieves  and  robbers  while  I  am  here. 
Chee,  chee,  chee. 

But  it  has  been  reserved  for  a  practical  ornitholo- 
gist, Mr.  Wilson  Flagg,  to  write  by  far  the  best  poem 
on  the  bobolink  that  I  have  yet  seen.  It  is  much 
more  in  the  mood  and  spirit  of  the  actual  song  than 
Bryant's  poem. 

THE  O'LINCOLN  FAMILY. 

A  flock  of  merry  singing-birds  were  sporting  in  the  grove; 
Some  were  warbling  cheerily,  and  some  were  making  love : 
There  were  Bobolincon,  Wadolincon,  Winterseeble,  Conquedle,  — 
A  livelier  set  was  never  led  by  tabor,  pipe,  or  fiddle,  — 
Crying,  "  Phew,  shew,  Wadolincon,  see,  see,  Bobolincon, 
Down  among  the  tickletops,  hiding  in  the  buttercups ! 

I  know  the  saucy  chap,  I  see  his  shining  cap 
Bobbing  in  the  clover  there  —  see,  see,  see !  " 

Up  flies  Bobolincon,  perching  on  an  apple-tree, 
Startled  by  his  rival's  song,  quickened  by  his  raillery, 
Soon  he  spies  the  rogue  afloat,  curveting  in  the  air, 
And  merrily  he  turns  about,  and  warns  him  to  beware ! 

II  'Tis  you  that  would  a-wooing  go,  down  among  the  rushes  0 ! 
But  wait  a  week,  till  flowers  are  cheery,  —  wait  a  week,  and  ere 

you  marry, 


30  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

Be  sure  of  a  house  wherein  to  tarry ! 

Wadolink,  Whiskodink,  Tom  Denny,  wait,  wait,  wait!" 

Every  one  's  a  funny  fellow;  every  one  '-s  a  little  mellow  ; 
Follow,  follow,  follow,  follow,  o'er  the  hill  and  in  the  hollow ! 
Merrily,  merrily,  there  they  hie ;  now  they  rise  and  now  they  fly ; 
They  cross  and  turn,  and  in  and  out,  and  down  in  the  middle,  and 

wheel  about,  — 
With  a  "  Phew,  shew,  Wadolincon!  listen  to  me,  Bobolincon!  — 
Happy  's  the  wooing  that's  speedily  doing,  that 's  speedily  doing, 
That 's  merry  and  over  with  the  bloom  of  the  clover! 
Bobolincon,  Wadolincon,  Winterseeble,  follow,  follow  me  !  " 

Many  persons,  I  presume,  have  admired  Words- 
worth's poem  on  the  cuckoo,  without  recognizing  its 
truthfulness,  or  how  thoroughly,  in  the  main,  the  de- 
scription applies  to  our  own  species.  If  the  poem 
had  been  written  in  New  England  or  New  York,  it 
could  not  have  suited  our  case  better. 

"  0  blithe  new-comer  !  I  have  heard, 
I  hear  thee  and  rejoice : 
O  cuckoo !  shall  I  call  thee  bird, 
Or  but  a  wandering  voice? 

"  While  I  am  lying  on  the  grass, 
Thy  loud  note  smites  my  ear ! 
From  hill  to  hill  it  seems  to  pass, 
At  once  far  off  and  near. 

"  I  hear  thee  babbling  to  the  vale 
Of  sunshine  and  of  flowers ; 
And  unto  me  thou  bring'st  a  tale 
Of  visionary  hours. 

"  Thrice  welcome,  darling  of  the  spring! 
Even  yet  thou  art  to  me 
No  bird,  but  an  invisible  thing, 
A  voice,  a  mystery. 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  31 

"  The  same  whom  in  my  school-boy  days 
I  listened  to ;  the  cry 
Which  made  me  look  a  thousand  ways 
In  bush,  and  tree,  and  sky. 

"  To  seek  thee  did  I  often  rove 

Through  woods  and  on  the  green ; 
And  thou  wert  still  a  hope,  a  love  ; 
Still  longed  for,  never  seen ! 

"  And  I  can  listen  to  thee  yet; 
Can  lie  upon  the  plain 
And  listen,  till  I  do  beget 
That  golden  time  again. 

M  0  blessed  bird !  the  earth  we  pace 
Again  appears  to  be 
An  unsubstantial,  fairy  place, 
That  is  fit  home  for  thee ! 

Logan's  stanzas,  "  To  the  Cuckoo,"  have  less  merit 
both  as  poetry  and  natural  history,  but  they  are  older, 
and  doubtless  the  later  poet  benefited  by  them. 
Burke  admired  them  so  much  that  while  on  a  visit 
to  Edinburgh  he  sought  the  author  out  to  compli- 
ment him. 

"  Hail,  beauteous  stranger  of  the  grove! 
Thou  messenger  of  spring ! 
Now  Heaven  repairs  thy  rural  seat, 
And  woods  thy  welcome  sing. 

"  What  time  the  daisy  decks  the  green, 
Thy  certain  voice  we  hear; 
Hast  thou  a  star  to  guide  thy  path, 
Or  mark  the  rolling  year? 

"  The  school-boy,  wandering  through  the  wood 
To  pull  the  primrose  gay, 


32  BIRDS  AND   POETS. 

Starts  thy  curious  voice  to  hear, 
And  imitates  thy  lav. 

"  Sweet  bird !  thy  bower  is  ever  green, 
Thy  sky  is  ever  clear ; 
Thou  hast  no  sorrow  in  thy  song, 
No  winter  in  thy  year." 

The  European  cuckoo  is  evidently  a  much  gayer 
bird  than  ours,  and  much  more  noticeable. 

14  Hark,  how  the  jolly  cuckoos  sing 
1  Cuckoo! '  to  welcome  in  the  spring," 

says  John  Lyly,  three  hundred  years  agone.  Its 
note  is  easily  imitated,  and  boys  will  render  it  so  per- 
fectly as  to  deceive  any  but  the  shrewdest  ear.  An 
English  lady  tells  me  its  voice  reminds  you  of  children 
at  play,  and  is  full  of  gayety  and  happiness.  It  is  a 
persistent  songster,  and  keeps  up  its  call  from  morn- 
iug  to  night.  Indeed,  certain  parts  of  Wordsworth's 
poem  —  those  that  refer  to  the  bird  as  a  mystery,  a 
wandering  solitary  voice  —  seem  to  fit  our  bird  better 
than  the  European  species.  Our  cuckoo  is  in  fact  a 
solitary  wanderer,  repeating  its  loud,  guttural  call  in 
the  depths  of  the  forest,  and  well  calculated  to  arrest 
the  attention  of  a  poet  like  Wordsworth,  who  was  him- 
self a  kind  of  cuckoo,  a  solitary  voice,  syllabling  the 
loneliness  that  broods  over  streams  and  woods :  — 
"At  once  far  off  and  near." 

Our  cuckoo  is  not  a  spring  bird,  being  seldom  seen 
or  heard  in  the  North  before  June.  He  is  a  great 
devourer  of  canker-worms,  and  when  these  pests  ap- 


BIRDS  AND  POETS.  33 

pear  he  comes  out  of  his  forest  seclusion  and  makes 
excursions  through  the  orchard  stealthily  and  quietly, 
regaling  himself  upon  those  pulpy,  fuzzy  tidbits.  His 
coat  of  deep  cinnamon  brown  has  a  silky  gloss  and  is 
very  beautiful.  His  note  or  call  is  not  musical,  but 
loud,  and  has  in  a  remarkable  degree  the  quality  of 
remoteness  and  in  trover tedness.  It  is  like  a  vocal 
legend,  and  to  the  farmer  bodes  rain. 

It  is  worthy  of  note,  and  illustrates  some  things 
said  farther  back,  that  birds  not  strictly  denominated 
songsters  but  criers,  like  the  cuckoo,  have  been  quite 
as  great  favorites  with  the  poets  and  received  as  af- 
fectionate treatment  at  their  hands  as  the  song-birds. 
One  readily  recalls  Emerson's  "Titmouse,"  Trow- 
bridge's "  Pewee,"  Celia  Thaxter's  "  Sandpiper,"  and 
others  of  a  like  character. 

It  is  also  worthy  of  note  that  the  owl  appears  to  be 
a  greater  favorite  with  the  poets  than  the  proud  soar- 
ing hawk.  The  owl  is  doubtless  the  more  human 
and  picturesque  bird ;  then  he  belongs  to  the  night 
and  its  weird  effects.  Bird  of  the  silent  wing  and 
expansive  eye,  grimalkin  in  feathers,  feline,  mousing, 
haunting  ruins  and  towers,  and  mocking  the  mid- 
night stillness  with  thy  uncanny  cry  !  The  owl  is 
the  great  bug-a-boo  of  the  feathered  tribes.  His  ap- 
pearance by  day  is  hailed  by  shouts  of  alarm  and 
derision  from  nearly  every  bird  that  flies,  from  crows 
down  to  sparrows.  They  swarm  about  him  like  flies 
and  literally  mob  him  back  into  his  dusky  retreat. 
Silence  is  as  the  breath  of  his  nostrils  to  him,  and 
3 


34  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

the  uproar  that  greets  hini  when  he  emerges  into  the 
open  day  seems  to  alarm  and  confuse  him  as  it  does 
the  pickpocket  when  everybody  cries  Thief. 
But  the  poets,  I  say,  have  not  despised  him. 

"  The  lark  is  but  a  bumpkin  fowl; 
He  sleeps  in  his  nest  till  morn ; 
But  my  blessing  upon  the  jolhT  owl 
That  all  night  blows  his  horn." 

Both  Shakespeare  and  Tennyson  have  made  songs 
about  him.  This  is  Shakespeare's,  from  "Love's 
Labor's  Lost,"  and  perhaps  has  reference  to  the 
white  or  snowy  owl :  — 

11  "When  icicles  hang  by  the  wall, 

And  Dick  the  shepherd  blows  his  nail, 
And  Tom  bears  logs  into  the  hall, 

And  milk  comes  frozen  in  the  pail; 
When  blood  is  nipped,  and  ways  be  foul, 
Then  nightly  sings  the  staring  owl, 

Tu-who ! 
Tu-whit !  tu-who !  a  merry  note, 
"While  greasy  Joan  doth  keel  the  pot. 

"  When  all  aloud  the  wind  doth  blow, 

And  coughing  drowns  the  parson's  saw, 
And  birds  sit  brooding  in  the  snow, 

And  Marian's  nose  looks  red  and  raw; 
"When  roasted  crabs  hiss  in  the  bowl, 
Then  nightly  sings  the  staring  owl, 

Tu-who ! 
Tu-whit !  tu-who !  a  merry  note, 
While  greasy  Joan  doth  keel  the  pot." 

There  is,  perhaps,  a  slight  reminiscence  of  this  song 
in  Tennyson's  "  Owl  "  :  — 


BIRDS  AND  POETS.  35 

"When  cats  run  home  and  light  is  come, 
And  dew  is  cold  upon  the  ground, 
And  the  far-off  stream  is  dumb, 

And  the  whirring  sail  goes  round, 
And  the  whirring  sail  goes  round; 
Alone  and  warming  his  five  wits 
The  white  owl  in  the  belfry  sits. 

11  "When  merry  milkmaids  click  the  latch, 
And  rarely  smells  the  new-mown  hay, 
And  the  cock  hath  sung  beneath  the  thatch, 
Twice  or  thrice  his  roundelay, 
Twice  or  thrice  his  roundelay; 
Alone  and  warming  his  five  wits, 
The  white  owl  in  the  belfry  sits." 

Tennyson  has  not  directly  celebrated  any  of  the 
more  famous  birds,  but  his  poems  contain  frequent 
allusions  to  them.     The 

"  Wild  bird,  whose  warble,  liquid  sweet, 
Rings  Eden  through  the  budded  quicks, 
Oh,  tell  me  where  the  senses  mix, 
Oh,  tell  me  where  the  passions  meet," — 

of  "  In  Memoriam,"  is  doubtless  the  nightingale.    And 
here  we  have  the  lark :  — 

11  Now  sings  the  woodland  loud  and  long, 
And  distance  takes  a  lovelier  hue, 
And  drowned  in  yonder  living  blue 
The  lark  becomes  a  sightless  song." 

And  again  in  this  from   "  A  Dream  of  Fair  Wom- 
en":— 

"Then  I  heard 
A  noise  of  some  one  coming  through  the  lawn, 
And  singing  clearer  than  the  crested  bird 
That  claps  his  wings  at  dawn." 


6b  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

The  swallow  is  a  favorite  bird  with  Tennyson,  and 
is  frequently  mentioned,  beside  being  the  principal 
figure  in  one  of  those  charming  love-songs  in  "  The 
Princess."  His  allusions  to  the  birds,  as  to  any  other 
natural  feature,  show  him  to  be  a  careful  observer,  as 
when  he  speaks  of 

"  The  swamp,  where  hums  the  dropping  snipe." 

His  single  bird-poem,  aside  from  the  song  I  have 
quoted,  is  "  The  Blackbird,"  the  Old- World  prototpye 
of  our  robin,  as  if  our  bird  had  doffed  the  aristocratic 
black  for  a  more  democratic  suit  on  reaching  these 
shores.  In  curious  contrast  to  the  color  of  its  plum- 
age is  its  beak,  which  is  as  yellow  as  a  kernel  of  In- 
dian corn.  The  following  are  the  two  middle  stanzas 
of  the  poem :  — 

"  Yet,  though  I  spared  thee  all  the  spring, 
Thy  sole  delight  is,  sitting  still, 
With  that  gold  dagger  of  thy  bill 
To  fret  the  summer  jenneting. 

"  A  golden  bill !  the  silver  tongue, 
Cold  February  loved,  is  dry; 
Plenty  corrupts  the  melody 
That  made  thee  famous  once,  when  young." 

Shakespeare,  in  one  of  his  songs,  alludes  to  the  black- 
bird as  the  ouzel-cock ;  indeed  he  puts  quite  a  flock 
of  birds  in  this  song :  — 

u  The  ouzel-cock  so  black  of  hue, 
"With  orange  tawny  bill ; 
The  throstle  with  his  note  so  true, 
The  wren  with  little  quill ; 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  37 

The  finch,  the  sparrow,  and  the  lark, 

The  plain  song  cuckoo  gray, 
Whose  note  full  many  a  man  doth  mark, 

And  dares  not  answer,  nay." 

So  far  as  external  appearances  are  concerned  — 
form,  plumage,  grace  of  manner,  etc.,  no  one  ever 
had  a  less  promising  subject  than  had  Trowbridge  in 
the  "  Pewee."  This  bird,  if  not  the  plainest  dressed, 
is  the  most  unshapely  in  the  woods.  It  is  stiff  and 
abrupt  in  its  manners  and  sedentary  in  its  habits,  sit- 
ting around  all  day,  in  the  dark  recesses  of  the  woods, 
on  the  dry  twigs  and  branches,  uttering  now  and  then 
its  plaintive  cry,  and  "  with  many  a  flirt  and  flutter " 
snapping  up  its  insect  game. 

The  pewee  belongs  to  quite  a  large  family  of  birds, 
all  of  whom  have  strong  family  traits,  and  who  are 
not  the  most  peaceable  and  harmonious  of  the  sylvan 
folk.  They  are  pugnacious,  harsh  voiced,  angular  in 
form  and  movement,  with  flexible  tails  and  broad,  flat, 
bristling  beaks  that  stand  to  the  face  at  the  angle  of 
a  turn-up  nose,  and  most  of  them  wear  a  black  cap 
pulled  well  down  over  their  eyes.  Their  heads  are 
large,  neck  and  legs  short,  and  elbows  sharp.  The 
wild  Irishman  of  them  all  is  the  great  crested  fly- 
catcher, a  large  leather  colored  or  sandy  complex- 
ioned  bird  that  prowls  through  the  woods,  uttering 
its  harsh,  uncanny  note  and  waging  fierce  warfare 
upon  its  fellows. 

The  exquisite  of  the  species,  and  the  braggart  of 
the  orchard,  is  the  kingbird,  a  bully  that  loves  to  strip 


38  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

the  feathers  off  its  more  timid  neighbors  like  the  blue- 
bird, that  feeds  on  the  stingless  bees  of  the  hive,  the 
drones,  and  earns  the  reputation  of  great  boldness  by 
teasing  large  hawks,  while  it  gives  a  wide  berth  to 
little  ones. 

The  best  beloved  of  them  all  is  the  phoebe-bird,  one 
of  the  firstlings  of  the  spring,  of  whom  so  many  of 
our  poets  have  made  affectionate  mention. 

The  wood-pewee  is  the  sweetest  voiced,  and  not- 
withstanding the  ungracious  things  I  have  said  of  it, 
and  of  its  relations,  merits  to  the  full  all  Trowbridge's 
pleasant  fancies.  His  poem  is  indeed  a  very  careful 
study  of  the  bird  and  its  haunts,  and  is  good  poetry 
as  well  as  good  ornithology. 

M  The  listening  Dryads  hushed  the  woods  ; 

The  boughs  were  thick,  and  thin  and  few 

The  golden  ribbons  fluttered  through ; 
Their  sun-embroidered  leafy  hoods 

The  lindens  lifted  to  the  blue ; 
Only  a  little  forest-brook 
The  farthest  hem  of  silence  shook  ; 
When  in  the  hollow  shades  I  heard,  — 
"Was  it  a  spirit  or  a  bird  ? 
Or,  strayed  from  Eden,  desolate, 
Some  Peri  calling  to  her  mate, 
Whom  nevermore  her  mate  would  cheer  ? 

1  Pe-ri !  pe-ri !  peer ! ' 


To  trace  it  in  its  green  retreat 

I  sought  among  the  boughs  in  vain; 
And  followed  still  the  wandering  strain, 

So  melancholy  and  so  sweet, 
The  dim-eyed  violets  yearned  with  pain. 


BIRDS  AND  POETS.  39 

'T  was  now  a  sorrow  in  the  air, 
Some  nymph's  immortalized  despair 
Haunting  the  woods  and  waterfalls ; 
And  now,  at  long,  sad  intervals, 
Sitting  unseen  in  dusky  shade, 
His  plaintive  pipe  some  fairy  played, 
With  long-drawn  cadence  thin  and  clear,  — 
1  Pe-wee !  pe-wee !  peer ! ' 

"  Long-drawn  and  clear  its  closes  were  — 

As  if  the  hand  of  Music  through 

The  sombre  robe  of  Silence  drew 
A  thread  of  golden  gossamer ; 

So  pure  a  flute  the  fairy  blew. 
Like  beggared  princes  of  the  wood, 
In  silver  rags  the  birches  stood  ; 
The  hemlocks,  lordly  counselors, 
Were  dumb  ;  the  sturdy  servitors, 
In  beechen  jackets  patched  and  gray, 
Seemed  waiting  spell-bound  all  the  day 
That  low,  entrancing  note  to  hear,  — 

1  Pe-wee !  pe-wee !  peer ! ' 

14 1  quit  the  search,  and  sat  me  down 

Beside  the  brook,  irresolute, 

And  watched  a  little  bird  in  suit 
Of  sombre  olive,  soft  and  brown, 

Perched  in  the  maple  branches,  mute ; 
With  greenish  gold  its  vest  was  fringed, 
Its  tiny  cap  was  ebon-tinged, 
With  ivory  pale  its  wings  were  barred, 
And  its  dark  eyes  were  tender-starred. 
"  Dear  bird,"  I  said,  "  what  is  thy  name?" 
And  thrice  the  mournful  answer  came, 
So  faint  and  far,  and  yet  so  near,  — 

4  Pe-wee !  pe-wee !  peer ! ' 

"  For  so  I  found  my  forest-bird,  — 
The  pewee  of  the  loneliest  woods, 


40  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

Sole  singer  in  these  solitudes, 
Which  never  robin's  whistle  stirred, 

"Where  never  bluebird's  plume  intrudes. 
Quick  darting  through  the  dewy  morn, 
The  redstart  trilled  his  twittering  horn 
And  vanished  in  thick  boughs  ;  at  even 
Like  liquid  pearls  fresh  showered  from  heaven, 
The  high  notes  of  the  lone  wood-thrush 
Fell  on  the  forest's  holy  hush  ; 
But  thou  all  day  complainest  here,  — 

1  Pe-wee !  pe-wee !  peer ! '  " 

Emerson's  best  natural  history  poem  is  the  "  Hum- 
blebee" —  a  poem  as  good  in  its  way  as  Burns's  poem 
on  the  mouse ;  but  his  later  poem,  "  The  Titmouse," 
has  many  of  the  same  qualities,  and  cannot  fail  to  be 
acceptable  to  both  poet  and  naturalist. 

The  chickadee  is  indeed  a  truly  Emersonian  bird, 
and  the  poet  shows  him  to  be  both  a  hero  and  a  phi- 
losopher. Hardy,  active,  social,  a  winter  bird  no  less 
than  a  summer,  a  defier  of  both  frost  and  heat,  lover 
of  the  pine-tree,  and  diligent  searcher  after  truth  in 
the  shape  of  eggs  and  larvae  of  insects,  preeminently 
a  New  England  bird,  clad  in  black  and  ashen  gray, 
with  a  note  the  most  cheering  and  reassuring  to  be 
heard  in  our  January  woods,  —  I  know  of  none  other 
of  our  birds  so  well  calculated  to  captivate  the  Emer- 
sonian muse. 

Emerson  himself  is  a  northern  hyperborean  genius 
—  a  winter  bird  with  a  clear,  saucy,  cheery  call,  and 
not  a  passionate  summer  songster.  His  lines  have 
little  melody  to  the  ear,  but  they  have  the  vigor  and 
distinctness  of  all  pure  and  compact  things.     They 


BIRDS   AND  POETS.  41 

are  like  the  needles  of  the  pine  —  "  the  snow  loving 
pine  "  —  more  than  the  emotional  foliage  of  the 
deciduous  trees,  and  the  titmouse  becomes  them 
well. 

"  Up  and  away  for  life !  be  fleet !  — 
The  frost-king  ties  my  fumbling  feet, 
Sings  in  my  ears,  my  hands  are  stones, 
Curdles  the  blood  to  the  marble  bones, 
Tugs  at  the  heart-strings,  numbs  the  sense, 
And  hems  in  life  with  narrowing  fence. 
Well,  in  this  broad  bed  lie  and  sleep, 
The  punctual  stars  will  vigil  keep ; 
Embalmed  by  purifying  cold, 
The  wind  shall  sing  their  dead-march  old  ; 
The  snow  is  no  ignoble  shroud, 
The  moon  thy  mourner,  and  the  cloud. 

"  Softly,  —  but  Qua  way  fate  was  pointing, 
'Twas  coming  fast  to  such  anointing, 
When  piped  a  tiny  voice  hard  by, 
Gay  and  polite,  a  cheerful  cry, 
Chick-chickadeedee  I  saucy  note, 
Out  of  sound  heart  and  merry  throat, 
As  if  it  said  •  Good  day,  good  sir ! 
Fine  afternoon,  old  passenger! 
Happy  to  meet  you  in  these  places, 
Where  January  brings  few  faces.' 

11  This  poet,  though  he  lived  apart, 
Moved  by  his  hospitable  heart, 
Sped,  when  I  passed  his  sylvan  fort, 
To  do  the  honors  of  his  court, 
As  fits  a  feathered  lord  of  land ; 
Flew  near,  with  soft  wing  grazed  my  hand, 
Hopped  on  the  bough,  then  darting  low, 
Prints  his  small  impress  on  the  snow, 
Shows  feats  of  his  gymnastic  play, 
Head  downward,  clinging  to  the  spray. 


42  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

"  Here  was  this  atom  in  full  breath, 
Hurling  defiance  at  vast  death ; 
This  scrap  of  valor  just  for  play 
Fronts  the  north-wind  in  waistcoat  gray, 
As  if  to  shame  my  weak  behavior ; 
I  greeted  loud  my  little  savior, 
1  You  pet !  what  dost  here '?  and  what  for  ? 
In  these  woods,  thy  small  Labrador, 
At  this  pinch,  wee  San  Salvador  ! 
"What  tire  burns  in  that  little  chest, 
So  frolic,  stout,  and  self-possest  ? 
Henceforth  I  wear  no  stripe  but  thine  ; 
Ashes  and  jet  all  hues  outshine. 
Why  are  not  diamonds  black  and  gray  ? 
And  I  affirm  the  spacious  north 
Exists  to  draw  thy  virtue  forth. 
I  think  no  virtue  goes  with  size ; 
The  reason  of  all  cowardice 
Is,  that  men  are  overgrown, 
And  to  be  valiant,  must  come  down 
To  the  titmouse  dimension.' 


"  I  think  old  Cassar  must  have  heard 
In  northern  Gaul  my  dauntless  bird, 
And,  echoed  in  some  frosty  wold, 
Borrowed  thy  battle-numbers  bold. 
And  I  will  write  our  annals  new 
And  thank  thee  for  a  better  clew. 
I,  who  dreamed  not  when  I  came  here 
To  find  the  antidote  of  fear, 
Now  hear  thee  say  in  Roman  key, 
Pcean!  Veni,vidi,  vici." 

A  late  bird-poem  and  a  good  one  of  its  kind  is 
Celia  Thaxter's  "  Sandpiper,"  which  recalls  Bryant's 
"  Water-fowl "  in  its  successful  rendering  of  the  spirit 
and  atmosphere  of  the  scene  and  the  distinctness  with 


BIRDS  AND   POETS.  43 

which  the  lone  bird,  flitting  along  the  beach  is  brought 
before  the  mind.  It  is  a  woman's,  or  a  feminine, 
poem,  as  Bryant's  is  characteristically  a  man's.  y 

The  sentiment  or  feeling  awakened  by  any  of  the 
aquatic  fowls  is  preeminently  one  of  loneliness.  The 
wood-duck  which  your  approach  starts  from  the  pond 
or  the  marsh,  the  loon  neighing  down  out  of  the 
April  sky,  the  wild  goose,  the  curlew,  the  stork,  the 
bittern,  the  sandpiper,  etc.,  awaken  quite  a  different 
train  of  emotions  from  those  awakened  by  the  land- 
birds.  They  all  have  clinging  to  them  some  remi- 
niscence and  suggestion  of  the  sea.  Their  cries  echo 
its  wildness  and  desolation ;  their  wings  are  the 
shape  of  its  billows. 

Of  the  sandpipers  there  are  many  varieties,  found 
upon  the  coast  and  penetrating  inland  along  the 
rivers  and  water-courses,  the  smallest  of  the  species, 
commonly  called  the  "  tip-up,"  going  up  all  the 
mountain  brooks  and  breeding  in  the  sand  along 
their  banks ;  but  the  characteristics  are  the  same  in 
all,  and  the  eye  detects  little  difference  except  in  size. 

The  walker  on  the  beach  sees  him  running  or  flit- 
ting before  him,  following  up  the  breakers  and  pick- 
ing up  the  aquatic  insects  left  on  the  sands  ;  and  the 
trout-fisher  along  the  farthest  inland  stream  like- 
wise intrudes  upon  its  privacy.  Flitting  along  from 
stone  to  stone  seeking  its  food,  the  hind  part  of  its 
body  "  teetering "  up  and  down,  its  soft  gray  color 
blending  it  with  the  pebbles  and  the  rocks ;  or  else 
skimming  up  or  down  the  stream  on  its  long  convex 


44  BIRDS   AND   POETS. 

wings,  uttering  its  shrill  cry,  the  sandpiper  is  not  a 
bird  of  the  sea  merely ;  and  Mrs.  Thaxter's  poem  is 
as  much  for  the  dweller  inland  as  the  dweller  upon 
the  coast. 

THE  SANDPIPER. 

Across  the  narrow  beach  we  flit, 

One  little  sandpiper  and  I ; 
And  fast  I  gather,  bit  by  bit, 

The  scattered  driftwood  bleached  and  dry. 
The  wild  waves  reach  their  hands  for  it, 

The  wild  wind  raves,  the  tide  runs  high, 
As  up  and  down  the  beach  we  flit,  — 

One  little  sandpiper  and  I. 

Above  our  heads  the  sullen  clouds 

Scud  black  and  swift  across  the  sky ; 
Like  silent  ghosts  in  misty  shrouds 

Stand  out  the  white  light-houses  high. 
Almost  as  far  as  eye  can  reach 

I  see  the  close-reefed  vessels  fly, 
As  fast  we  flit  along  the  beach,  — 

One  little  sandpiper  and  I. 

I  watch  him  as  he  skims  along, 

Uttering  his  sweet  and  mournful  cry ; 
He  starts  not  at  my  fitful  song, 

Or  flash  of  fluttering  drapery ; 
He  has  no  thought  of  any  wrong ; 

He  scans  me  with  a  fearless  eye. 
Stanch  friends  are  we,  well  tried  and  strong, 

The  little  sandpiper  and  I. 

Comrade,  where  wilt  thou  be  to-night 
When  the  loosed  storm  breaks  furiously  ? 

My  driftwood  fire  will  burn  so  bright ! 
To  what  warm  shelter  canst  thou  fly  ? 


BIRDS   AND   POETS.  45 

I  do  not  fear  for  thee,  though  wroth 
The  tempest  rushes  through  the  sky ; 

For  are  we  not  God's  children  both, 
Thou,  little  sandpiper,  and  I  ? 

Others  of  our  birds  have  been  game  for  the  poetic 
muse,  but  in  most  cases  the  poets  have  had  some 
moral  or  pretty  conceit  to  convey  and  have  not  loved 
the  bird  first.  Mr.  Lathrop  preaches  a  little  in  his 
pleasant  poem,  "  The  Sparrow,"  but  he  must  some- 
time have  looked  upon  the  bird  with  genuine  emotion 
to  have  written  the  first  two  stanzas :  — 

II  Glimmers  gay  the  leafless  thicket 

Close  beside  my  garden  gate, 
Where,  so  light,  from  post  to  thicket, 
Hops  the  sparrow,  blithe,  sedate ; 

Who,  with  meekly  folded  wing, 

Comes  to  sun  himself  and  sing. 

"  It  was  there,  perhaps,  last  year, 
That  his  little  house  he  built; 
For  he  seems  to  perk  and  peer, 
And  to  twitter,  too,  and  tilt 
The  bare  branches  in  between, 
With  a  fond,  familiar  mien. 

The  bluebird  has  not  been  overlooked,  and  Halleck, 
Longfellow,  and  Mrs.  Sigourney  have  written  poems 
upon  him,  but  from  none  of  them  does  there  fall  that 
first  note  of  his  in  early  spring  —  a  note  that  may  be 
called  the  violet  of  sound  and  as  welcome  to  the  ear 
heard  above  the  cold  damp  earth,  as  is  its  floral  type 
to  the  eye  a  few  weeks  later.  Lowell's  two  lines 
come  nearer  the  mark :  — 

"  The  bluebird,  shifting  his  light  load  of  song 
From  post  to  post  along  the  cheerless  fence." 


46  BIRDS  AND   POETS. 

Or  the  first  swallow  that  comes  twittering  up  the 
southern  valley,  laughing  a  gleeful  childish  laugh, 
and  awakening  such  memories  in  the  heart,  who  has 
put  him  in  a  poem  ?  So  the  humming-bird  too  es- 
capes through  the  finest  meshes  of  rhyme. 

The  most  melodious  of  our  songsters,  the  wood- 
thrush  and  hermit-thrush  —  birds  whose  strains,  more 
than  any  others,  express  harmony  and  serenity  — 
have  not,  as  I  am  aware  of,  yet  had  reared  to  them 
their  merited  poetic  monument  —  unless  indeed  the 
already  named  poet  of  the  mocking-bird  has  done 
this  service  for  the  hermit-thrush  in  his  "  President 
Lincoln's  Burial  Hymn."  Here  the  threnody  is  blent 
of  three  chords,  the  blossoming  lilac,  the  evening  star, 
and  the  hermit-thrush,  the  latter  playing  the  most 
prominent  part  throughout  the  composition.  It  is 
the  exalting  and  spiritual  utterance  of  the  "  solitary 
singer  "  that  calms  and  consoles  the  poet,  when  the 
powerful  shock  of  the  President's  assassination  comes 
upon  him,  and  he  flees  from  the  stifling  atmosphere 
and  offensive  lights  and  conversation  of  the  house, 

"  Forth  to  hiding,  receiving  night  that  talks  not, 
Down  to  the  shores  of  the  water,  the  path  by  the  swamp  in  the 

dimness, 
To  the  solemn  shadowy  cedars  and  ghostly  pines  so  still." 

Numerous  others  of  our  birds  would  seem  to  chal- 
lenge attention  by  their  calls  and  notes.  There  is 
the  Maryland  yellow-throat,  for  instance,  standing  in 
the  door  of  his  bushy  tent,  and  calling  out  as  you  ap- 
proach, "  which  way,  sir  I  "  "  which  way,  sir  I  "     If 


BIRDS  AND  POETS.  47 

he  says  this  to  the  ear  of  common  folk,  what  would 
he  not  say  to  the  poet  ?  One  of  the  pewees  says 
"  stay  there  I "  with  great  emphasis.  The  cardinal 
grossbeak  calls  out  "  what  cheer"  u  what  cheer  ;  "  the 
bluebird  says  "purity"  "purity"  "purity;"  the 
brown-thrasher,  or  ferruginous  thrush,  according  to 
Thoreau,  calls  out  to  the  farmer  planting  his  corn, 
"  drop  it"  "  drop  it"  "  cover  it  up"  "  cover  it  up" 
The  yellow-breasted  chat  says  "who"  "who"  and 
"tea-boy."  What  the  robin  says,  caroling  that  simple 
strain  from  the  top  of  the  tall  maple,  or  the  crow  with 
his  hardy  haw-haw,  or  the  pedestrian  meadow-lark 
sounding  his  piercing  and  long-drawn  note  in  the 
spring  meadows,  the  poets  ought  to  be  able  to  tell 
us.  I  only  know  the  birds  all  have  a  language  which 
is  very  expressive,  and  which  is  easily  translatable 
into  the  human  tongue. 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 


TOUCHES  OF  NATURE. 


Wherever  Nature  has  commissioned  one  creature 
to  prey  upon  another,  she  has  preserved  the  balance 
by  forewarning  that  other  creature  of  what  she  has 
done.  Nature  says  to  the  cat,  "  Catch  the  mouse," 
and  she  equips  her  for  that  purpose ;  but  on  the  self- 
same day  she  says  to  the  mouse,  "  Be  wary  —  the  cat 
is  watching  for  you."  Nature  takes  care  that  none 
of  her  creatures  have  smooth  sailing,  the  whole  voy- 
age at  least.  Why  has  she  not  made  the  musquito 
noiseless  and  its  bite  itchless  ?  Simply  because  in 
that  case  the  odds  would  be  too  greatly  in  its  favor. 
She  has  taken  especial  pains  to  enable  the  owl  to  fly 
softly  and  silently,  because  the  creatures  it  preys  upon 
are  small  and  wary,  and  never  venture  far  from  their 
holes.  She  has  not  shown  the  same  caution  in  the 
case  of  the  crow,  because  the  crow  feeds  on  dead  flesh- 
or  on  grubs  and  beetles,  or  fruit  and  grain,  that  do 
not  need  to  be  approached  stealthily.  The  big  fish 
love  to  eat  up  the  little  fish,  and  the  little  fish  know 
it,  and  on  the  very  day  they  are  hatched  seek  shallow 


52  TOUCHES   OF   NATURE. 

water,  and  put  little  sand  bars  between  themselves 
and  their  too  loving  parents. 

How  easily  a  bird's  tail,  or  that  of  any  fowl,  or  in 
fact  any  part  of  the  plumage,  comes  out  when  the 
hold  of  its  would-be  capturer  is  upOn  this  alone ;  and 
how  hard  it  yields  in  the  dead  bird.  No  doubt  there 
is  relaxation  in  the  former  case.  Nature  says  to  the 
pursuer,  "  Hold  on,"  and  to  the  pursued,  "  Let  your 
tail  go."  What  is  the  tortuous  zig-zag  course  of  those 
slow-flying  moths  for  but  to  make  it  difficult  for  the 
birds  to  snap  them  up  ?  The  skunk  is  a  slow,  witless 
creature,  and  the  fox  and  lynx  love  its  meat ;  yet  it 
carries  a  bloodless  weapon  that  neither  likes  to  face. 

I  recently  heard  of  an  ingenious  method  a  certain 
other  simple  and  slow  going  creature  has  of  baffling 
its  enemy.  A  friend  of  mine  was  walking  in  the  fields 
when  he  saw  a  commotion  in  the  grass  a  few  yards 
off.  Approaching  the  spot,  he  found  a  snake  —  the 
common  garter  snake— *  trying  to  swallow  a  lizard. 
And  how  do  you  suppose  the  lizard  was  defeating  the 
benevolent  designs  of  the  snake  ?  By  simply  taking 
hold  of  its  own  tail  and  making  itself  into  a  hoop. 
The  snake  went  round  and  round  and  could  find 
neither  beginning  nor  end.  Who  was  the  old  giant 
that  found  himself  wrestling  with  Time  ?  This  little 
snake  had  a  tougher  customer  the  other  day  in  the 
bit  of  eternity  it  was  trying  to  swallow. 

The  snake  itself  has  not  the  same  wit,  because  I 
lately  saw  a  black  snake  in  the  woods  trying  to  swal- 
low the  garter  snake,  and  he  had  made  some  head- 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  53 

way,  though  the  little  snake  was  fighting  every  inch 
of  the  ground,  hooking  his  tail  about  sticks  and 
bushes,  and  pulling  back  with  all  his  might,  appar- 
ently not  liking  the  look  of  things  down  there  at  all. 
I  thought  it  well  to  let  him  have  a  good  taste  of  his 
own  doctrines,  when  I  put  my  foot  down  against 
further  proceedings.  \/ 

This  arming  of  one  creature  against  another  is  often 
cited  as  an  evidence  of  the  wisdom  of  Nature,  but  it 
is  rather  an  evidence  of  her  impartiality.  She  does 
not  care  a  fig  more  for  one  creature  than  for  another, 
and  is  equally  on  the  side  of  both,  or  perhaps  it  would 
be  better  to  say  she  does  not  care  a  fig  for  either. 
Every  creature  must  take  its  chances,  and  man  is  no 
exception.  We  can  ride  if  we  know  how  and  are 
going  her  way,  or  we  can  be  run  over  if  we  fall  or 
make  a  mistake.  Nature  does  not  care  whether  the 
hunter  slay  the  beast  or  the  beast  the  hunter ;  she 
will  make  good  compost  of  them  both,  and  her  ends 
are  prospered  whichever  succeed. 

"  If  the  red  slayer  thinks  he  slaj-s, 
Or  if  the  slain  think  he  is  slain, 
They  know  not  well  the  subtle  ways 
I  keep,  and  pass,  and  turn  again." 

What  is  the  end  of  Nature  ?  Where  is  the  end  of 
a  sphere  ?  The  sphere  balances  at  any  and  every 
point.  So  everything  in  Nature  is  at  the  top,  and 
yet  no  one  thing  is  at  the  top. 

She  works  with  reference  to  no  measure  of  time, 
no  limit  of  space,  and  with  an  abundance  of  material 


54  TOUCHES   OF   NATURE. 

not  expressed  by  exhaustless.  Did  you  think  Niagara 
a  great  exhibition  of  power  ?  What  is  that,  then,  that 
withdraws  noiseless  and  invisible  in  the  ground  about, 
and  of  which  Niagara  is  but  the  lifting  of  the  finger  ? 

Nature  is  thoroughly  selfish,  and  looks  only  to  her 
own  ends.  One  thing  she  is  bent  upon,  and  that  is 
keeping  up  the  supply,  multiplying  endlessly  and 
scattering  as  she  multiplies.  Did  Nature  have  in 
view  our  delectation  when  she  made  the  apple,  the 
peach,  the  plum,  the  cherry,  etc.  ?  Undoubtedly ;  but 
only  as  a  means  to  her  own  private  ends.  What  a 
bribe  or  a  wage  is  the  pulp  of  these  delicacies  to  all 
creatures  to  come  and  sow  their  seed.  And  Nature 
has  taken  care  to  make  the  seed  indigestible,  so  that 
though  the  fruit  be  eaten,  the  germ  is  not,  but  only 
planted. 

God  made  the  crab,  but  man  made  the  pippin  ;  but 
the  pippin  cannot  propagate  itself,  and  exists  only  by 
violence  and  usurpation.  Bacon  says,  "  It  is  easier 
to  deceive  Nature  than  to  force  her,"  but  it  seems  to 
me  the  nurserymen  really  force  her.  They  cut  off 
the  head  of  a  savage  and  clap  on  the  head  of  a  fine 
gentleman,  and  the  crab  becomes  a  Swaar  or  a  Bald- 
win. Or  is  it  a  kind  of  deception  practiced  upon 
Nature,  which  succeeds  only  by  being  carefully  con- 
cealed ?  If  we  could  play  the  same  tricks  upon  her 
in  the  human  species,  how  the  great  geniuses  could 
be  preserved  and  propagated,  and  the  world  stocked 
with  them.  But  what  a  frightful  condition  of  things 
that  would  be !     No  new  men,  but  a  tiresome  and 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  55 

endless  repetition  of  the  old  ones  —  a  world  perpet- 
ually stocked  with  Newtons  and  Shakespeares. 

We  say  Nature  knows  best  and  has  adapted  this  or 
that  to  our  wants  or  to  our  constitution  —  sound  to 
the  ear,  light  and  color  to  the  eye,  etc. ;  but  she  has 
not  done  any  such  thing,  but  has  adapted  man  to 
these  things.  The  physical  cosmos  is  the  mould,  and 
man  is  the  molten  metal  that  is  poured  into  it.  The 
light  fashioned  the  eye,  the  laws  of  sound  made  the 
ear ;  in  fact  man  is  the  outcome  of  Nature  and  not 
the  reverse.  Creatures  that  live  forever  in  the  dark 
have  no  eyes ;  and  would  not  any  one  of  our  senses 
perish  and  be  shed  as  it  were  in  a  world  where  it 
could  not  be  used  ? 

ii. 

It  is  well  to  let  down  our  metropolitan  pride  a 
little.  Man  thinks  himself  at  the  top,  and  that  the 
immense  display  and  prodigality  of  Nature  are  for 
him.  But  they  are  no  more  for  him  than  they  are 
for  the  birds  and  beasts,  and  he  is  no  more  at  the  top 
than  they  are.  He  appeared  upon  the  stage  when 
the  play  had  advanced  to  a  certain  point,  and  he  will 
disappear  from  the  stage  when  the  play  has  reached 
another  point,  and  the  great  drama  go  on  without 
him.  The  geological  ages,  the  convulsions  and  par- 
turition throes  of  the  globe,  were  to  bring  him  forth 
no  more  than  the  beetles.  Is  not  all  this  wealth  of 
the  seasons,  these  solar  and  sidereal  influences,  this 
depth  and  vitality  and  internal  fire,  these  seas,  and 


56  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

rivers,  and  oceans,  and  atmospheric  currents,  as  neces- 
sary to  the  life  of  the  ants  and  worms  we  tread  under 
foot  as  to  our  own  ?  And  does  the  sun  shine  for  me 
any  more  than  for  yon  butterfly  ?  What  I  mean  to 
say  is,  we  cannot  put  our  finger  upon  this  or  that  and 
say  here  is  the  end  of  Nature.  The  Infinite  cannot 
be  measured.  The  plan  of  Nature  is  so  immense  — 
but  she  has  no  plan,  no  scheme,  but  to  go  on  and  on 
forever.  What  is  size,  what  is  time,  distance,  etc.,  to 
the  Infinite  ?  Nothing.  The  Infinite  knows  no  time, 
no  space,  no  great,  no  small,  no  beginning,  no  end. 

I  sometimes  think  that  the  earth  and  the  worlds 
are  a  kind  of  nervous  ganglia  in  an  organization  of 
which  we  can  form  no  conception,  or  less  even  than 
that.  If  one  of  the  globules  of  blood  that  circulate 
in  our  veins  was  magnified  enough  million  times,  we 
might  see  a  globe  teeming  with  life  and  power.  Such 
is  this  earth  of  ours,  coursing  in  the  veins  of  the  In- 
finite. Size  is  only  relative,  and  the  imagination 
finds  no  end  to  the  series  either  way. 

in. 

Looking  out  of  the  car  window  one  day,  I  saw 
the  pretty  and  unusual  sight  of  an  eagle  sitting  upon 
the  ice  in  the  river,  surrounded  by  half  a  dozen  or 
more  crows.  The  crows  appeared  as  if  looking  up  to 
the  noble  bird  and  attending  his  movements.  "  Are 
those  its  young?"  asked  a  gentleman  by  my  side. 
How  much  did  that  man  know  —  not  about  eagles, 
but  about  Nature  ?     If  he  had   been    familiar  with 


TOUCHES    OF   NATURE.  57 

geese  or  hens,  or  with  donkeys,  he  would  not  have 
asked  that  question.  The  ancients  had  an  axiom 
that  he  who  knew  one  truth  knew  all  truths ;  so 
much  else  becomes  knowable  when  one  vital  fact  is 
thoroughly  known.  You  have  a  key,  a  standard,  and 
cannot  be  deceived.  Chemistry,  geology,  astronomy, 
natural  history,  all  admit  one  to  the  same  measureless 
interiors. 

I  heard  a  great  man  say  that  he  could  see  how 
much  of  the  theology  of  the  day  would  fall  before  the 
standard  of  him  who  had  got  even  the  insects.  And 
let  any  one  set  about  studying  these  creatures  care- 
fully, and  he  will  see  the  force  of  the  remark.  We 
learn  the  tremendous  doctrine  of  metamorphosis  from 
the  insect  world ;  and  have  not  the  bee  and  the  ant 
taught  man  wisdom  from  the  first?  I  was  highly 
edified  the  past  summer  by  observing  the  ways  and 
doings  of  a  colony  of  black  hornets  that  established 
themselves  under  one  of  the  projecting  gables  of  my 
house.  This  hornet  has  the  reputation  of  being  a 
very  ugly  customer,  but  I  found  it  no  trouble  to  live 
on  the  most  friendly  terms  with  them.  They  were 
as  little  disposed  to  quarrel  as  I  was.  It  is  indeed 
the  eagle  among  hornets,  and  very  noble  and  digni- 
fied in  its  bearing.  They  used  to  come  freely  into 
the  house  and  prey  upon  the  flies.  You  would  hear 
that  deep,  mellow  hum,  and  see  the  black  falcon  pois- 
ing on  wing,  or  striking  here  and  there  at  the  flies, 
that  scattered  on  his  approach  like  chickens  before  a 
hawk.     When   he   had  caught  one  he  would  alight 


58  TOUCHES    OF   NATURE. 

upon  some  object  and  proceed  to  dress  and  draw  his 
game.  The  wings  were  sheared  off,  the  legs  cut 
away,  the  bristles  trimmed,  then  the  body  thoroughly 
bruised  and  broken.  When  the  work  was  completed, 
the  fly  was  rolled  up  into  a  small  pellet,  and  with  it 
under  his  arm  the  hornet  flew  to  his  nest,  where  no 
doubt  in  due  time  it  was  properly  served  up  on  the 
royal  board.  Every  dinner  inside  these  paper  walls 
is  a  state  dinner,  for  the  queen  bee  is  always  present. 

I  used  to  mount  the  ladder  to  within  two  or  three 
feet  of  the  nest  and  observe  the  proceedings.  I  at 
first  thought  the  workshop  must  be  inside  —  a  place 
where  the  pulp  was  mixed  and  perhaps  treated  with 
chemicals  ;  for  each  bee  when  he  came  with  his  bur- 
den of  materials  passed  into  the  nest,  and  then,  after 
a  few  moments,  emerged  again  and  crawled  to  the 
place  of  building.  But  I  one  day  stopped  up  the 
entrance  with  some  cotton,  when  no  one  happened  to 
be  on  guard,  and  then  observed  that  when  the  loaded 
bee  could  not  get  inside,  he,  after  some  deliberation, 
proceeded  to  the  unfinished  part  and  went  forward 
with  his  work.  Hence  I  inferred  that  may  be  the 
bee  went  inside  to  report  and  to  receive  orders,  or 
possibly  to  surrender  its  material  into  fresh  hands. 
Its  career  when  away  from  the  nest  is  beset  with  dan- 
gers ;  the  colony  is  never  large,  and  the  safe  return 
of  every  beewis  no  doubt  a  matter  of  solicitude  to  the 
royal  mother. 

The  hornet  was  the  first  paper  maker,  and  holds 
the  original  patent.     The  paper  it  makes  is  about  like 


TOUCHES   OF 'NATURE.  59 

that  of  the  newspaper ;  nearly  as  firm,  and  made  of 
essentially  the  same  material — woody  fibres  scraped 
from  old  rails  and  boards.  And  there  is  news  on  it 
too,  if  one  could  make  out  the  characters. 

When  I  stopped  the  entrance  with  cotton  there 
was  no  commotion  or  excitement,  as  there  would  have 
been  in  the  case  of  yellow-jackets.  Those  outside 
went  to  pulling,  and  those  inside  went  to  pushing  and 
chewing.  Only  once  did  one  of  the  outsiders  come 
down  and  look  me  suspiciously  in  the  face,  and  in- 
quire very  plainly  what  my  business  might  be  up 
there.  I  bowed  my  head,  being  at  the  top  of  a  twenty 
foot  ladder,  and  had  nothing  to  say. 

The  cotton  was  chewed  and  moistened  about  the 
edges  till  every  fibre  was  loosened,  when  the  mass 
dropped.  But  instantly  the  entrance  was  made 
smaller,  and  changed  so  as  to  make  the  feat  of  stop- 
ping it  more  difficult. 


There  are  those  who  look  at  Nature  from  the 
standpoint  of  conventional  and  artificial  life  —  from 
parlor  windows  and  through  gilt-edged  poems  —  the 
sentimentalists.  At  the  other  extreme  are  those  who 
do  not  look  at  Nature  at  all,  but  are  a  grown  part  of 
her,  and  look  away  from  her  toward  the  other  class 
—  the  backwoodsmen  and  pioneers,  and  all  rude  and 
simple  persons.  Then  there  are  those  in  whom  the 
two  are  united  or  merged  —  the  great  poets  and 
artists.     In  them  the  sentimentalist  is  corrected  and 


60  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

cured,  aud  the  hairy  and  taciturn  frontiersman  has 
had  experience  to  some  purpose.  The  true  poet 
knows  more  about  Nature  than  the  naturalist  be- 
cause he  carries  her  open  secrets  in  his  heart.  Ecker- 
man  could  instruct  Goethe  in  ornithology,  but  could 
not  Goethe  instruct  Eckerman  in  the  meaning  and 
mystery  of  the  bird  ?  It  is  my  privilege  to  number 
among  my  friends  a  man  who  has  passed  his  life  in 
cities  amid  the  throngs  of  men,  who  never  goes  to  the 
woods  or  to  the  country,  or  hunts  or  fishes,  and  yet 
he  is  the  true  naturalist.  I  think  he  studies  the  orbs. 
I  think  day  and  night  and  the  stars  and  the  faces  oi 
men  and  women  have  taught  him  all  there  is  worth 
knowing. 

We  run  to  Nature  because  we  are  afraid  of  man. 
Our  artists  paint  the  landscape  because  they  cannot 
paint  the  human  face.  If  we  could  look  into  the  eyes 
of  a  man  as  coolly  as  we  can  into  the  eyes  of  an  ani- 
mal, the  products  of  our  pens  and  brushes  would  be 
quite  different  from  what  they  are. 


But  I  suspect  after  all  it  makes  but  little  difference 
to  which  school  you  go,  whether  to  the  woods  or  to 
the  city.  A  sincere  man  learns  pretty  much  the  same 
things  in  both  places.  The  differences  are  superficial, 
the  resemblances  deep  and  many.  The  hermit  is  a 
hermit  and  the  poet  a  poet,  whether  he  grow  up  in 
the  town  or  the  country.  I  was  forcibly  reminded  of 
this  fact  recently  on  opening  the  works  of  Charles 


TOUCHES    OF   NATURE.  61 

Lamb  after  I  had  been  reading  those  of  our  Henry 
Thoreau.  Lamb  cared  nothing  for  nature,  Thoreau 
for  little  else.  One  was  as  attached  to  the  city  and 
the  life  of  the  street  and  tavern  as  the  other  to  the 
country  and  the  life  of  animals  and  plants.  Yet  they 
are  close  akin.  They  give  out  the  same  tone  and 
are  pitched  in  about  the  same  key.  Their  methods 
are  the  same ;  so  are  their  quaintness  and  scorn  of 
rhetoric.  Thoreau  has  the  drier  humor,  as  might  be 
expected,  and  is  less  stomachic.  There  is  more  juice 
and  unction  in  Lamb,  but  this  he  owes  to  his  nation- 
ality. Both  are  essayists  who  in  a  less  reflective 
age  would  have  been  poets  pure  and  simple.  Both 
were  spare,  high-nosed  men,  and  I  fancy  a  resem- 
blance even  in  their  portraits.  Thoreau  is  the  Lamb 
of  New  England  fields  and  woods,  and  Lamb  is  the 
Thoreau  of  London  streets  and  clubs.  There  was  a 
willfulness  and  perversity  about  Thoreau  behind  which 
he  concealed  his  shyness  and  his  thin  skin,  and  there 
was  a  similar  foil  in  Lamb,  though  less  marked,  on 
account  of  his  good-nature ;  that  was  a  part  of  his 
armor  too. 

VI. 

Speaking  of  Thoreau's  dry  humor  reminds  me 
how  surely  the  old  English  unctuous  and  sympathetic 
humor  is  dying  out  or  has  died  out  of  our  literature. 
Our  first  notable  crop  of  authors  had  it  —  Paulding, 
Cooper,  Irving,  and  in  a  measure  Hawthorne  —  but 
our  later  humorists  have  it  not  at  all,  but  in  its  stead 


62  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

an  intellectual  quickness  and  perception  of  the  ludi- 
crous that  is  not  unmixed  with  scorn. 

One  of  the  marks  of  the  great  humorist,  like  Cer- 
vantes, or  Sterne,  or  Scott,  is  that  he  approaches  his 
subject,  not  through  his  head  merely,  but  through  his 
heart,  his  love,  his  humanity.  His  humor  is  full  of 
compassioD,  full  of  the  milk  of  human  kindness,  and 
does  not  separate  him  from  his  subject,  but  unites 
him  to  it  by  vital  ties.  How  Sterne  loved  Uncle 
Toby  and  sympathized  with  him,  and  Cervantes  his 
luckless  knight.  I  fear  our  humorists  would  have 
made  fun  of  them,  would  have  shown  them  up  and 
stood  aloof  superior,  and  "  laughed  a  laugh  of  merry 
scorn."  Whatever  else  the  great  humorist  or  poet, 
or  any  artist,  may  be  or  do,  there  is  no  contempt  in 
his  laughter.  And  this  point  cannot  be  too  strongly 
insisted  on  in  view  of  the  fact  that  nearly  all  our 
humorous  writers  seem  impressed  with  the  conviction 
that  their  own  dignity  and  self-respect  require  them 
to  look  down  upon  what  they  portray.  But  it  is  only 
little  men  who  look  down  upon  anything  or  speak 
down  to  anybody. 

One  sees  every  day  how  clear  it  is  that  specially 
fine,  delicate,  intellectual  persons  cannot  portray  sat- 
isfactorily coarse,  common,  uncultured  characters. 
Their  attitude  is  at  once  scornful  and  supercilious. 
The  great  man,  like  Socrates,  or  Br.  Johnson,  or 
Abraham  Lincoln,  is  just  as  surely  coarse  as  he  is 
fine,  but  the  complaint  I  make  with  our  humorists 
is  that  they  are  fine  and  not  coarse  in  any  healthful 


TOUCHES   OF   NATURE.  63 

and  manly  sense.  A  great  part  of  the  best  literature 
and  the  best  art  is  of  the  vital  fluids,  the  bowels,  the 
chest,  the  appetites,  and  is  to  be  read  and  judged  only 
through  love  and  compassion.  Let  us  pray  for  unc- 
tion, which  is  the  marrowfat  of  humor,  and  for  humil- 
ity, which  is  the  badge  of  manhood. 

As  the  voice  of  the  American  has  retreated  from 
his  chest  to  his  throat  and  nasal  passages,  so  there  is 
danger  that  his  contribution  to  literature  will  soon 
cease  to  imply  any  blood  or  viscera,  or  healthful 
carnality,  or  depth  of  human  and  manly  affection,  and 
be  the  fruit  entirely  of  our  toploftical  brilliancy  and 
cleverness. 

What  I  complain  of  is  just  as  true  of  the  essayists 
and  the  critics  as  of  the  novelists.  The  prevailing 
tone  here  also  is  born  of  a  feeling  of  immense  superi- 
ority. How  our  lofty  young  men,  for  instance,  look 
down  upon  Carlyle,  and  administer  their  masterly 
rebukes  to  him.  But  see  how  Carlyle  treats  Burns, 
or  Scott,  or  Johnson,  or  Novalis,  or  any  of  his  heroes. 
Ay,  there 's  the  rub ;  he  makes  heroes  of  them, 
which  is  not  a  trick  of  small  natures.  He  can  say 
of  Johnson  that  he  was  "  moonstruck,"  but  it  is  from 
no  lofty  height  of  fancied  superiority,  but  he  uses 
the  word  as  a  naturalist  uses  a  term  to  describe  an 
object  he  loves. 

What  we  want,  and  perhaps  have  got  more  of  than 
I  am  ready  to  admit,  is  a  race  of  writers  who  affiliate 
with  their  subjects  and  enter  into  them  through  their 
blood,  their  sexuality,  and  manliness,  instead  of  stand- 


64  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

ing  apart  and  criticising  them  and  writing  about  them 
through  mere  intellectual  cleverness  and  "  smartness." 

VII. 

There  is  a  feeling  in  heroic  poetry  or  in  a  burst 
of  eloquence  that  I  sometimes  catch  in  quite  different 
fields.  I  caught  it  this  morning,  for  instance,  when 
I  saw  the  belated  trains  go  by,  and  knew  how  they 
had  been  battling  with  storm,  darkness,  and  distance, 
and  had  triumphed.  They  were  due  at  my  place  in 
the  night,  but  did  not  pass  till  after  eight  o'clock  in 
the  morning.  Two  trains  coupled  together  —  the 
fast  mail  and  the  express  —  making  an  immense  line 
of  coaches  hauled  by  two  engines.  They  had  come 
from  the  West,  were  all  covered  with  snow  and  ice, 
like  soldiers  with  the  dust  of  battle  upon  them.  They 
had  massed  their  forces,  and  were  now  moving  with 
augmented  speed,  and  with  a  resolution  that  was  epic 
and  grand.  Talk  about  the  railroad  dispelling  the 
romance  from  the  landscape ;  if  it  does,  it  brings 
the  heroic  element  in.  The  moving  train  is  a  proud 
spectacle,  especially  in  stormy  and  tempestuous 
nights.  When  I  look  out  and  see  its  light,  steady 
and  unflickering  as  the  planets,  and  hear  the  roar  of 
its  advancing  tread,  or  its  sound  diminishing  in  the 
distance,  am  I  comforted  and  made  stout  of  heart. 
O  night,  where  is  thy  stay  !  O  space,  where  is  thy 
victory !  Or  to  see  the  fast  mail  pass  in  the  morning 
is  as  good  as  a  page  of  Homer.  It  quickens  one's 
pulse  for  all  day.     It  is  the  Ajax  of  trains.     I  hear 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  65 

its  defiant,  warning  whistle,  hear  it  thunder  over  the 
bridges,  and  its  sharp,  rushing  ring  among  the  rocks, 
and  in  the  winter  mornings  see  its  glancing,  meteoric 
lights,  or  in  summer  its  white  form  bursting  through 
the  silence  and  the  shadows,  its  plume  of  smoke  lying 
flat  upon  its  roofs  and  stretching  far  behind  —  a  sight 
better  than  a  battle.  It  is  something  of  the  same 
feeling  one  has  in  witnessing  any  wild,  free  careering 
in  storms  and  in  floods  in  nature,  or  in  beholding  the 
charge  of  an  army,  or  in  listening  to  an  eloquent 
man,  or  to  a  hundred  instruments  of  music  in  full 
blast  —  it  is  triumph,  victory.  What  is  eloquence 
but  mass  in  motion  —  a  flood,  a  cataract,  an  express 
train,  a  cavalry  charge?  We  are  literally  carried 
away,  swept  from  our  feet,  and  recover  our  senses 
again  as  best  we  can. 

I  experienced  the  same  emotion  when  I  saw  them 
go  by  with  the  sunken  steamer.  The  procession 
moved  slowly  and  solemnly.  It  was  like  a  funeral 
cortege,  —  a  long  line  of  grim  floats  and  barges  and 
boxes,  with  their  bowed  and  solemn  derricks  —  the 
pall-bearers  —  and  underneath  in  her  watery  grave, 
where  she  had  been  for  six  months,  the  sunken 
steamer,  partially  lifted  and  borne  along.  Next  day 
the  procession  went  back  again,  and  the  spectacle  was 
still  more  eloquent.  The  steamer  had  been  taken  to 
the  flats  above  and  raised  till  her  walking  beam  was 
out  of  water ;  her  bell  also  was  exposed  and  cleaned 
and  rung,  and  the  wreckers'  Herculean  labor  seemed 
nearly  over.  But  that  night  the  winds  and  the  storms 
5 


6Q  TOUCHES   OF   NATURE. 

held  high  carnival.  It  looked  like  preconcerted  ac- 
tion on  the  part  of  tide,  tempest,  and  rain,  to  defeat 
these  wreckers,  for  the  elements  all  pulled  together 
and  pulled  till  cables  and  hawser  snapped  like  threads. 
Back  the  procession  started,  anchors  were  dragged  or 
lost,  immense  new  cables  were  quickly  taken  ashore 
and  fastened  to  trees;  but  no  use,  trees  were  up- 
turned, the  cables  stretched  till  they  grew  small  and 
sang  like  harp  strings,  then  parted  ;  back,  back  against 
the  desperate  efforts  of  the  men,  till  within  a  few  feet 
of  her  old  grave,  when  there  was  a  great  commotion 
among  the  craft,  floats  were  overturned,  enormous 
chains  parted,  colossal  timbers  were  snapped  like  pipe- 
stems,  and  with  a  sound  that  filled  all  the  air,  the 
steamer  plunged  to  the  bottom  again  in  seventy  feet 
of  water. 

VIII. 

I  am  glad  to  observe  that  all  the  poetry  of  the  mid- 
summer harvesting  has  not  gone  out  with  the  scythe 
and  the  whetstone.  The  line  of  mowers  was  a  pretty 
sight,  if  one  did  not  sympathize  too  deeply  with  the 
human  backs  turned  up  there  to  the  sun,  and  the 
sound  of  the  whetstone,  coming  up  from  the  meadows 
in  the  dewy  morning,  was  pleasant  music.  But  I 
find  the  sound  of  the  mowing-machine  and  the  patent 
reaper  are  even  more  in  tune  with  the  voices  of 
nature  at  this  season.  The  characteristic  sounds  of 
midsummer  are  the  sharp,  whirring  crescendo  of  the 
cicada  or  harvest  fly,  and  the  rasping,  stridulous  notes 
of  the  nocturnal  insects.     The  mowing-machine  re- 


TOUCHES  OF  NATURE.  67 

peats  and  imitates  these  sounds.  'T  is  like  the  hum 
of  a  locust  or  the  shuffling  of  a  mighty  grasshopper. 
More  than  that,  the  grass  and  the  grain  at  this  season 
have  become  hard.  The  timothy  stalk  is  like  a  file  ; 
the  rye  straw  is  glazed  with  flint ;  the  grasshoppers 
snap  sharply  as  they  fly  up  in  front  of  you,  the  bird- 
songs  have  ceased,  the  ground  crackles  under  foot, 
the  eye  of  day  is  brassy  and  merciless,  and  in  har- 
mony with  all  these  things  is  the  rattle  of  the  mower 
and  hay  tedder. 

IX. 

'T  is  an  evidence  of  how  directly  we  are  related  to 
Nature,  that  we  more  or  less  sympathize  with  the 
weather,  and  take  on  the  color  of  the  day.  Goethe 
said  he  worked  easiest  in  a  high  barometer.  One  is 
like  a  chimney  that  draws  well  some  days  and  won't 
draw  at  all  on  others,  and  the  secret  is  mainly  in  the 
condition  of  the  atmosphere.  Anything  positive  and 
decided  with  the  weather  is  a  good  omen.  A  pour- 
ing rain  may  be  more  auspicious  than  a  sleeping  sun- 
shine. When  the  stove  draws  well  the  fogs  and 
fumes  will  leave  your  mind. 

I  find  there  is  great  virtue  in  the  bare  ground,  and 
have  been  much  put  out  at  times  by  those  white  an- 
gelic days  we  have  in  winter,  such  as  Whittier  has  so 
well  described  in  these  lines  :  — 

"  Around  the  glistening  wonder  bent 
The  blue  walls  of  the  firmament ; 
No  cloud  above,  no  earth  below, 
A  universe  of  sky  and  snow." 


68  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

On  such  days  my  spirit  gets  snow  blind ;  all  things 
take  on  the  same  color,  or  no  color ;  my  thought 
loses  its  perspective  ;  the  inner  world  is  a  blank  like 
the  outer,  and  all  my  great  ideals  are  wrapped  in  the 
same  monotonous  and  expressionless  commonplace. 
The  blackest  of  black  days  are  better. 

"Why  does  snow  so  kill  the  landscape  and  blot  out 
our  interest  in  it?  Not  merely  because  it  is  cold, 
and  the  symbol  of  death,  for  I  imagine  as  many 
inches  of  apple  blossoms  would  have  about  the  same 
effect ;  but  because  it  expresses  nothing.  White  is 
a  negative  ;  a  perfect  blank.  The  eye  was  made  for 
color,  and  for  the  earthy  tints,  and  when  these  are 
denied  it,  the  mind  is  very  apt  to  sympathize  and  to 
suffer  also. 

Then  when  the  sap  begins  to  mount  in  the  trees, 
and  the  spring  languor  comes,  does  not  one  grow 
restless  indoors  ?  The  sun  puts  out  the  fire,  the  peo- 
ple say,  and  the  spring  sun  certainly  makes  one's  in- 
tellectual light  grow  dim.  Why  should  not  a  man 
sympathize  with  the  seasons  and  the  moods  and 
phases  of  Nature  ?  He  is  an  apple  upon  this  tree, 
or  rather  he  is  a  babe  at  this  breast,  and  what  his 
great  mother  feels  affects  him  also. 


I  have  frequently  been  surprised,  in  late  fall  and 
early  winter,  to  see  how  unequal  or  irregular  was  the 
encroachment  of  the  frost  upon  the  earth.  If  there 
is  suddenly  a  great  fall  in  the  mercury,  the  frost  lays 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  69 

siege  to  the  soil  and  effects  a  lodgment  here  and  there, 
and  extends  its  conquests  gradually.  At  one  place  in 
the  field  you  can  easily  run  your  staff  through  into  the 
soft  ground,  when  a  few  rods  farther  on  it  will  be  as 
hard  as  a  rock.  A  little  covering  of  dry  grass  or 
leaves  is  a  great  protection.  The  moist  places  hold 
out  long  and  the  spring  runs  never  freeze.  You  find 
the  frost  has  gone  several  inches  into  the  plowed 
ground,  but  on  going  to  the  woods  and  poking  away 
the  leaves  and  debris  under  the  hemlocks  and  cedars, 
you  find  there  is  no  frost  at  all.  The  earth  freezes 
her  ears,  and  toes,  and  naked  places  first,  and  her 
body  last. 

If  heat  was  visible,  or  if  we  represent  it  say  by 
smoke,  then  the  December  landscape  would  present 
a  curious  spectacle.  We  would  see  the  smoke  lying 
low  over  the  meadows,  thickest  in  the  hollows  and 
moist  places,  and  where  the  turf  was  oldest  and 
densest.  It  would  cling  to  the  fences  and  ravines. 
Under  every  evergreen  tree  we  would  see  the  vapor 
rising  and  filling  the  branches,  while  the  woods  of  pine 
and  hemlock  would  be  blue  with  it  long  after  it  had 
disappeared  from  the  open  country.  It  would  rise 
from  the  tops  of  the  trees  and  be  carried  this  way 
and  that  with  the  wind.  The  valleys  of  the  great 
rivers,  like  the  Hudson,  would  overflow  with  it. 
Large  bodies  of  water  become  regular  magazines  in 
which  heat  is  stored  during  the  summer,  and  they 
give  it  out  again  during  the  fall  and  early  winter. 
The  early  frosts  keep  well  back  from  the  Hudson, 


70  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

skulking  behind  the  ridges,  and  hardly  come  over  in 
sight  at  any  point.  But  they  grow  bold  as  the  sea- 
son advances,  till  the  river's  fires  too  are  put  out  and 
winter  covers  it  with  his  snows. 

XI. 

One  of  the  strong  and  original  strokes  of  Nature 
was  when  she  made  the  loon.  It  is  always  refresh- 
ing to  contemplate  a  creature  so  positive  and  charac- 
teristic. He  is  the  great  diver  and  flyer  under  water. 
The  loon  is  the  genus  loci  of  the  wild  northern  lakes, 
as  solitary  as  they  are.  Some  birds  represent  the 
majesty  of  Nature,  like  the  eagles ;  others  its  feroc- 
ity, like  the  hawks ;  others  its  cunning,  like  the 
crow ;  others  its  sweetness  and  melody,  like  the  song- 
birds. The  loon  represents  its  wildness  and  solitari- 
ness. It  is  cousin  to  the  beaver.  It  has  the  feathers 
of  a  bird  and  the  fur  of  an  animal,  and  the  heart  of 
both.  It  is  as  quick  and  cunning  as  it  is  bold  and 
resolute.  It  dives  with  such  marvelous  quickness 
that  the  shot  of  the  gunner  get  there  just  in  time 
"  to  cut  across  a  circle  of  descending  tail  feathers  and 
a  couple  of  little  jets  of  water  flung  upward  by  the 
web  feet  of  the  loon."  When  disabled  so  that  it  can 
neither  dive  nor  fly,  it  is  said  to  face  its  foe,  look  him 
in  the  face  with  its  clear,  piercing  eye,  and  fight  reso- 
lutely till  death.  The  gunners  say  there  is  something 
in  its  wailing,  piteous  cry,  when  dying,  almost  human 
in  its  agony.  The  loon  is,  in  the  strictest  sense,  an 
aquatic  fowl.     It  can  barely  walk  upon  the  land,  and 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  71 

one  species  at  least  cannot  take  flight  from  the  shore. 
But  in  the  water  its  feet  are  more  than  feet  and  its 
wings  more  than  wings.  It  plunges  into  this  denser 
air  and  flies  with  incredible  speed.  Its  head  and  beak 
form  a  sharp  point  to  its  tapering  neck.  Its  wings 
are  far  in  front  and  its  legs  equally  far  in  the  rear, 
and  its  course  through  the  crystal  depths  is  like  the 
speed  of  an  arrow.  In  the  northern  lakes  it  has  been 
taken  forty  feet  under  water  upon  hooks  baited  for 
the  great  lake  trout.  I  had  never  seen  one  till  last 
fall,  when  one  appeared  on  the  river  in  front  of  my 
house.  I  knew  instantly  it  was  the  loon.  Who  could 
not  tell  a  loon  a  half  mile  or  more  away,  though  he 
had  never  seen  one  before  ?  The  river  was  like  glass, 
and  every  movement  of  the  bird  as  it  sported  about 
broke  the  surface  into'  ripples,  that  revealed  it  far 
and  wide.  Presently  a  boat  shot  out  from  shore  and 
went  ripping  up  the  surface  toward  the  loon.  The 
creature  at  once  seemed  to  divine  the  intentions  of 
the  boatman,  and  sidled  off  obliquely,  keeping  a  sharp 
lookout  as  if  to  make  sure  it  was  pursued.  A  steamer 
came  down  and  passed  between  them,  and  when  the 
way  was  again  clear  the  loon  was  still  swimming  on 
the  surface.  Presently  it  disappeared  under  the 
water,  and  the  boatman  pulled  sharp  and  hard.  In  a 
few  moments  the  bird  reappeared  some  rods  farther 
on,  as  if  to  make  an  observation.  Seeing  it  was  be- 
ing pursued,  and  no  mistake,  it  dove  quickly,  and 
when  it  came  up  again,  had  gone  many  times  as  far 
as  the  boat  had  in  the  same  space  of  time.     Then  it 


72  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

dove  again,  and  distanced  its  pursuer  so  easily  that 
he  gave  over  the  chase  and  rested  upon  his  oars.  But 
the  bird  made  a  final  plunge,  and  when  it  emerged 
upon  the  surface  again  it  was  over  one  mile  away. 
Its  course  must  have  been,  and  doubtless  was,  an  act- 
ual flight  under  water,  and  half  as  fast  as  the  crow 
flies  in  the  air. 

The  loon  would  have  delighted  the  old  poets.  Its 
wild,  demoniac  laughter  awakens  the  echoes  on  the 
solitary  lakes,  and  its  ferity  and  hardiness  was  kin- 
dred to  those  robust  spirits. 

XII. 

One  notable  difference  between  man  and  the  four- 
footed  animals  which  has  often  occurred  to  me  is  in 
the  eye,  and  the  greater  perfection,  or  rather  suprem- 
acy of  the  senses  of  sight  in  the  human  species.  All 
the  animals  —  the  dog,  the  fox,  wolf,  deer,  cow,  horse, 
etc.  —  depend  mainly  upon  the  senses  of  hearing  and 
smell.  Almost  their  entire  powers  of  discrimination 
are  confined  to  these  two  senses.  The  dog  picks  his 
master  out  of  the  crowd  by  smell,  and  the  cow  her 
calf  out  of  the  herd.  Sight  is  only  partial  recogni- 
tion. The  question  can  only  be  settled  beyond  all 
doubt  by  the  aid  of  the  nose.  The  fox,  alert  and 
cunning  as  he  is,  will  pass  within  a  few  yards  of  the 
hunter  and  not  know  him  from  a  stump.  A  squirrel 
will  run  across  your  lap  and  a  marmot  between  your 
feet  if  you  are  motionless.  When  a  herd  of  cattle 
see  a  strange  object  they  are  not  satisfied  till  each 


TOUCHES   OF   NATURE.  id 

one  has  sniffed  it ;  and  the  horse  is  cured  of  his  fright 
at  the  robe,  or  the  meal  bag,  or  other  object,  as  soon 
as  he  can  be  induced  to  smell  it.  There  is  a  great 
deal  of  speculation  in  the  eye  of  an  animal,  but  very 
little  science.  Then  you  cannot  catch  an  animal's 
eye ;  he  looks  at  you,  but  not  into  your  eye.  The 
dog  directs  his  gaze  toward  your  face,  but  for  aught 
you  can  tell  it  centres  upon  your  mouth  or  nose. 
The  same  with  your  horse  or  cow.  Their  eye  is 
vague  and  indefinite. 

Not  so  with  the  birds.  The  bird  has  the  human 
eye  in  its  clearness,  its  power,  and  its  supremacy 
over  the  other  senses.  How  acute  their  sense  of 
smell  may  be  is  uncertain;  their  hearing  is  sharp 
enough,  but  their  vision  is  the  most  remarkable.  A 
crow  or  a  hawk,  or  any  of  the  larger  birds,  will  not 
mistake  you  for  a  stump,  or  rock,  stand  you  never  so 
still  amid  the  bushes.  But  they  cannot  separate  you 
from  your  horse  or  team.  A  hawk  reads  a  man  on 
horseback  as  one  animal,  and  reads  it  as  a  horse. 
None  of  the  sharp-scented  animals  could  be  thus 
deceived. 

The  bird  has  man's  brain  also  in  its  size.  The 
brain  of  a  song-bird  is  even  much  larger  in  propor- 
tion than  that  of  the  greatest  human  monarch,  and 
its  life  is  correspondingly  intense  and  high-strung. 
But  the  bird's  eye  is  superficial.  It  is  on  the  outside 
of  his  head.  It  is  round  that  it  may  take  in  a  full 
circle  at  a  glance. 

All  the  quadrupeds  emphasize  their  direct  forward 


74  TOUCHES   OF   NATURE. 

gaze  by  a  corresponding  movement  of  the  ears  as  if 
to  supplement  and  aid  one  sense  with  another.  But 
man's  eye  seldom  needs  the  confirmation  of  his  ear, 
while  it  is  so  set,  and  his  head  so  poised,  that  his  look 
is  forcible  and  pointed  without  being  thus  seconded. 

XIII. 

I  once  saw  a  cow  that  had  lost  her  cud.  How 
forlorn  and  desolate  and  sick  at  heart  that  cow 
looked !  No  more  rumination,  no  more  of  that  second 
and  finer  mastication,  no  more  of  that  sweet  and  juicy 
revery  under  the  spreading  trees,  or  in  the  stall. 
Then  the  farmer  took  an  elder  and  scraped  the  bark 
and  put  something  with  it  and  made  the  cow  a  cud, 
and  after  due  waiting  the  experiment  took,  a  response 
came  back,  and  the  mysterious  machinery  was  once 
more  in  motion,  and  the  cow  was  herself  again. 

Have  you,  O  poet,  or  esayist,  or  story  writer,  never 
lost  your  cud  and  wandered  about  days  and  weeks 
without  being  able  to  start  a  single  thought  or  an 
image  that  tasted  good  —  your  literary  appetite  dull 
or  all  gone,  and  the  conviction  daily  growing  that  it 
is  all  over  with  you  in  that  direction  ?  A  little  elder 
bark,  something  fresh  and  bitter  from  the  woods,  is 
about  the  best  thing  you  can  take. 

xiv. 

Notwithstanding  what  I  have  elsewhere  said  about 
the  desolation  of  snow,  when  one  looks  closely  it  is 
little  more  than  a  thin  veil  after  all,  and  takes  and 


TOUCHES   OF   NATURE.  75 

repeats  the  form  of  whatever  it  covers.  Every  path 
through  the  fields  is  just  as  plain  as  before.  On 
every  hand  the  ground  sends  tokens,  and  the  curves 
and  slopes  are  not  of  the  snow,  but  of  the  earth 
beneath.  In  like  manner  the  rankest  vegetation 
hides  the  ground  less  than  we  think.  Looking  across 
a  wide  valley  in  the  month  of  July,  I  have  noted 
that  the  fields,  except  the  meadows,  had  a  ruddy 
tinge,  and  that  corn  which  near  at  hand  seemed  to 
completely  envelop  the  soil,  at  that  distance  gave 
only  a  slight  shade  of  green.  The  color  of  the 
ground  everywhere  predominated,  and  I  doubt  not 
if  we  could  see  the  earth  from  a  point  sufficiently 
removed,  as  from  the  moon,  its  ruddy  hue,  like  that 
of  Mars,  would  alone  be  visible. 

What  is  a  man  but  a  miniature  earth,  with  many 
disguises  in  the  way  of  manners,  possessions,  dissem- 
blances, etc.  ?  Yet  through  all  —  through  all  the 
work  of  his  hands  and  all  the  thoughts  of  his  mind  — 
how  surely  the  ground  quality  of  him,  the  fundamen- 
tal hue,  whether  it  be  this  or  that,  makes  itself  felt 
and  is  alone  important. 

xv. 

Men  follow  their  noses  it  is  said.  I  have  won- 
dered why  the  Greek  did  not  follow  his  nose  in 
architecture  —  did  not  copy  those  arches  that  spring 
from  it  as  from  a  pier,  and  support  his  brow — but 
always  and  everywhere  used  the  post  and  the  lintel. 
There  was  something  in   that  face   that  has  never 


76  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

reappeared  in  the  human  countenance.  I  am  thinking 
especially  of  that  straight,  strong  profile.  Is  it  really 
god-like,  or  is  this  impression  the  result  of  associa- 
tion ?  But  any  suggestion  or  reminiscence  of  it  in 
the  modern  face  at  once  gives  one  the  idea  of 
strength.  It  is  a  face  strong  in  the  loins,  or  it  sug- 
gests a  high,  elastic  instep.  It  is  the  face  of  order 
and  proportion.  Those  arches  are  the  symbols  of 
law  and  self-control.  The  point  of  greatest  interest 
is  the  union  of  the  nose  with  the  brow,  —  that  strong 
high  embankment ;  it  makes  the  bridge  from  the 
ideal  to  the  real  sure  and  easy.  All  his  ideas  passed 
readily  into  form.  In  the  modern  face  the  arches  are 
more  or  less  crushed,  and  the  nose  severed  from  the 
brow  —  hence  the  abstract  and  the  analytic ;  hence 
the  preponderance  of  the  speculative  intellect  over 
creative  power. 

XVI. 

I  have  thought  that  the  boy  is  the  only  true  lover 
of  Nature,  and  that  we  who  make  such  a  dead  set  at 
studying  and  admiring  her  come  very  wide  of  the 
mark.  "  The  nonchalance  of  a  boy  who  is  sure  of  his 
dinner,"  says  our  Emerson,  "is  the  healthy  attitude 
of  humanity."  The  boy  is  a  part  of  Nature ;  he  is 
as  indifferent,  as  careless,  as  vagrant  as  she.  He 
browses,  he  digs,  he  hunts,  he  climbs,  he  halloes,  he 
feeds  on  roots,  and  greens,  and  mast.  He  uses  things 
roughly  and  without  sentiment.  The  coolness  with 
which  boys  will  drown  dogs  or  cats  or  hang  them  to 


TOUCHES   OF   NATURE.  77 

trees,  or  murder  young  birds,  or  torture  frogs  or 
squirrels,  is  like  Nature's  own  mercilessness. 

Certain  it  is  that  we  often  get  some  of  the  best 
touches  of  nature  from  children.  Childhood  is  a 
world  by  itself,  and  we  listen  to  children  when  they 
frankly  speak  out  of  it  with  a  strange  interest. 
There  is  such  a  freedom  from  responsibility  and  from 
worldly  wisdom  —  it  is  heavenly  wisdom.  There  is 
no  sentiment  in  children,  because  there  is  no  ruin ; 
nothing  has  gone  to  decay  about  them  yet  —  not  a 
leaf  or  twig.  Until  he  is  well  into  his  teens,  and 
sometimes  later,  a  boy  is  like  a  bean  pod  before  the 
fruit  has  developed  —  indefinite,  succulent,  rich  in 
possibilities  which  are  only  vaguely  outlined.  He  is 
a  pericarp  merely.  How  rudimental  are  all  his  ideas. 
I  knew  a  boy  who  began  his  school  composition  on 
swallows  by  saying  there  were  two  kinds  of  swallows 
—  chimney  swallows  and  swallows. 

Girls  come  to  themselves  sooner ;  are  indeed  from 
the  first  more  definite  and  "translatable." 

XVII. 

Who  will  write  the  natural  history  of  the  boy  ? 
One  of  the  first  points  to  be  taken  account  of  is  his 
clannishness.  The  boys  of  one  neighborhood  are 
always  pitted  against  those  of  an  adjoining  neighbor- 
hood, or  of  one  end  of  the  town  against  those  of  the 
other  end.  A  bridge,  a  river,  a  railroad  track,  are 
always  boundaries  of  hostile  or  semi-hostile  tribes. 
The  boys  that  go  up  the  road  from  the  country  school 


78  TOUCHES   OF  NATURE. 

hoot  derisively  at  those  that  go  down  the  road,  and 
not  infrequently  add  the  insult  of  stones  ;  and  the 
down-roaders  return  the  hooting  and  the  missiles 
with  interest. 

Often  there  is  open  war,  and  the  boys  meet  and 
have  regular  battles.  A  few  years  since  the  boys  of 
two  rival  towns  on  opposite  sides  of  the  Ohio  River 
became  so  belligerent  that  the  authorities  had  to  in- 
terfere. Whenever  an  Ohio  boy  was  caught  on  the 
West  Virginia  side  of  the  river  he  was  unmercifully 
beaten,  and  when  a  West  Virginia  boy  was  discovered 
on  the  Ohio  side,  he  was  pounced  upon  in  the  same 
manner.  One  day  a  vast  number  of  boys,  about  one 
hundred  and  fifty  on  a  side,  met  by  appointment  upon 
the  ice  and  engaged  in  a  pitched  battle.  Every  con- 
ceivable missile  was  used,  including  pistols.  The 
battle,  says  the  local  paper,  raged  with  fury  for  about 
two  hours.  One  boy  received  a  wound  behind  the 
ear,  from  the  effects  of  which  he  died  the  next  morn- 
ing. More  recently  the  boys  of  a  large  manufactur- 
ing town  of  New  Jersey  were  divided  into  two  hos- 
tile clans  that  came  into  frequent  collision.  One 
Saturday  both  sides  mustered  its  forces,  and  a  regular 
fight  ensued,  one  boy  here  also  losing  his  life  from 
the  encounter. 

Every  village  and  settlement  is  at  times  the  scene 
of  these  youthful  collisions.  When  a  new  boy  ap- 
pears in  the  village,  or  at  the  country  school,  how 
the  other  boys  crowd  around  him  and  take  his  meas- 
ure, or  pick  at  him  and  insult  him  to  try  his  mettle. 


TOUCHES    OF   NATURE.  79 

I  knew  a  boy,  twelve  or  thirteen  years  old,  who 
was  sent  to  help  a  drover  with  some  cattle  as  far  as  a 
certain  village  ten  miles  from  his  home.  After  the 
place  was  reached,  and  while  the  boy  was  eating  his 
cracker  and  candies,  he  strolled  about  the  village, 
and  fell  in  with  some  other  boys  playing  upon  a 
bridge.  In  a  short  time  a  large  number  of  children 
of  all  sizes  had  collected  upon  the  bridge.  The  new 
comer  was  presently  challenged  by  the  boys  of  his 
own  age  to  jump  with  them.  This  he  readily  did, 
and  cleared  their  farthest  mark.  Then  he  gave  them 
a  sample  of  his  stone-throwing,  and  at  this  pastime 
he  also  far  surpassed  his  competitors.  Before  long 
the  feeling  of  the  crowd  began  to  set  against  him, 
showing  itself  first  in  the  smaller  fry,  who  began  half 
playfully  to  throw  pebbles  and  lumps  of  dry  earth  at 
him.  Then  they  would  run  up  slyly  and  strike  him 
with  sticks.  Presently  the  large  ones  began  to  tease 
him  in  like  manner,  till  the  contagion  of  hostility 
spread,  and  the  whole  pack  was  arrayed  against  the 
strange  boy.  He  kept  them  at  bay  for  a  few  mo- 
ments with  his  stick,  till,  the  feeling  mounting  higher 
and  higher,  he  broke  through  their  ranks,  and  fled 
precipitately  toward  home,  with  the  throng  of  little 
and  big  at  his  heels.  Gradually  the  girls  and  smaller 
boys  dropped  behind,  till  at  the  end  of  the  first  fifty 
rods  only  two  boys  of  about  his  own  size,  with  wrath 
and  determination  in  their  faces,  kept  up  the  pursuit. 
But  to  these  he  added  the  final  insult  of  beating  them 
at  running  also,  and  reached,  much  blown,  a  point 
beyond  which  they  refused  to  follow. 


80  TOUCHES   OF   NATURE. 

The  world  the  boy  lives  in  is  separate  and  distinct 
from  the  world  the  man  lives  in.  It  is  a  world  in- 
habited only  by  boys.  No  events  are  important  or 
of  any  moment  save  those  affecting  boys.  How  they 
ignore  the  presence  of  their  elders  on  the  street, 
shouting  out  their  invitations,  their  appointments, 
their  pass-words  from  our  midst,  as  from  the  veriest 
solitude.  They  have  peculiar  calls,  whistles,  signals, 
by  which  they  communicate  with  each  other  at  long 
distances  like  birds  or  wild  creatures.  And  there  is 
as  genuine  a  wildness  about  these  notes  and  calls  as 
about  those  of  a  fox  or  coon. 

The  boy  is  a  savage,  a  barbarian,  in  his  taste  — 
devouring  roots,  leaves,  bark,  unripe  fruit,  etc. ;  and 
in  the  kind  of  music  or  discord  he  delights  in,  —  of 
harmony  he  has  no  perception.  He  has  his  fashions 
that  spread  from  city  to  city.  In  one  of  our  large 
cities  the  rage  at  one  time  was  an  old  tin  can  with  a 
string  attached,  out  of  which  they  tortured  the  most 
savage  and  ear-splitting  discords.  The  police  was 
obliged  to  interfere  and  suppress  the  nuisance.  On 
another  occasion,  at  Christmas,  they  all  came  forth 
with  tin  horns,  and  nearly  drove  the  town  distracted 
with  the  hideous  uproar. 

Another  savage  trait  of  the  boy  is  his  untruthful- 
ness. Corner  him  and  the  chances  are  ten  to  one  he 
will  lie  his  way  out.  Conscience  is  a  plant  of  slow 
growth  in  the  boy.  If  caught  in  one  lie,  he  invents 
another.  I  knew  a  boy  who  was  in  the  habit  of  eat- 
ing apples  in  school.     His  teacher  finally  caught  him 


TOUCHES   OF  NATURE.  81 

in  the  act,  and  without  removing  his  eye  from  him, 
called  him  to  the  middle  of  the  floor. 

"  I  saw  you  this  time,"  said  the  teacher. 

"  Saw  me  what  ?  "  said  the  boy,  innocently. 

"  Bite  that  apple,"  replied  the  teacher. 

"  No,  sir,"  said  the  rascal. 

"  Open  your  mouth ; "  and  from  its  depths  the 
teacher,  with  his  thumb  and  finger,  took  out  the  piece 
of  apple. 

"  Did  n't  know  it  was  there,"  said  the  boy,  un- 
abashed. 

Nearly  all  the  moral  sentiment  and  graces  are  late 
in  maturing  in  the  boy.  He  has  no  proper  self- 
respect  till  past  his  majority.  Of  course  there  are 
exceptions,  but  they  are  mostly  windfalls.  The  good 
boys  die  young.  We  lament  the  wickedness  and 
thoughtlessness  of  the  young  vagabonds  at  the  same 
time  that  we  know  it  is  mainly  the  acridity  and  bit- 
terness of  the  unripe  fruit  that  we  are  lamenting. 


A  BIRD   MEDLEY. 


A   BIED    MEDLEY. 

People  who  have  not  made  friends  with  the  birds 
do  not  know  how  much  they  miss.  Especially  to 
one  living  in  the  country,  of  strong  local  attach- 
ments, and  an  observing  turn  of  mind,  does  an  ac- 
quaintance with  the  birds  form  a  close  and  inval- 
uable tie.  The  only  time  I  saw  Thomas  Carlyle,  I 
remember  his  relating,  apropos  of  this  subject,  that 
in  his  earlier  days  he  was  sent  on  a  journey  to  a 
distant  town  on  some  business  that  gave  him  much 
bother  and  vexation,  and  that  on  his  way  back  home, 
forlorn  and  dejected,  he  suddenly  heard  the  larks 
singing  all  about  him  —  soaring  and  singing,  just  as 
they  did  about  his  father's  fields,  and  it  had  the  ef- 
fect to  comfort  him  and  cheer  him  up  amazingly. 

Most  lovers  of  the  birds  can  doubtless  recall  similar 
experiences  from  their  own  lives.  Nothing  wonts  me 
to  a  new  place  more  than  the  birds.  I  go,  for  instance, 
to  take  up  my  abode  in  the  country,  —  to  plant  my- 
self upon  unfamiliar  ground.  I  know  nobody,  and 
nobody  knows  me.  The  roads,  the  fields,  the  hills, 
the  streams,  the  woods  are  all  strange.     I  look  wist- 


86  A   BIED   MEDLEY. 

fully  upon  them,  but  they  know  me  not.  They  give 
back  nothing  to  my  yearning  gaze.  But  there,  on  every 
hand,  are  the  long-familiar  birds  —  the  same  ones  I 
left  behind  me,  the  same  ones  I  knew  in  my  youth  — 
robins,  sparrows,  swallows,  bobolinks,  crows,  hawks, 
high-holes,  meadow-larks,  etc.,  all  there  before  me, 
and  ready  to  renew  and  perpetuate  the  old  associa- 
tions. Before  my  house  is  begun,  theirs  is  com- 
pleted ;  before  I  have  taken  root  at  all,  they  are 
thoroughly  established.  I  do  not  yet  know  what  kind 
of  apples  my  apple-trees  bear,  but  there,  in  the  cav- 
ity of  a  decayed  limb,  the  bluebirds  are  building  a 
nest,  and  yonder,  on  that  branch,  the  social  sparrow 
is  busy  with  hairs  and  straws.  The  robins  have 
tasted  the  quality  of  my  cherries,  and  the  cedar-birds 
have  known  every  red  cedar  on  the  place  these  many 
years.  While  my  house  is  yet  surrounded  by  its 
scaffoldings,  the  phoebe-bird  has  built  her  exquisite 
mossy  nest  on  a  projecting  stone  beneath  the  eaves, 
a  robin  has  filled  a  niche  in  the  wall  with  mud  and 
dry  grass,  the  chimney-swallows  are  going  out  and  in 
the  chimney,  and  a  pair  of  house-wrens  are  at  home 
in  a  snug  cavity  over  the  door,  and,  during  an  April 
snow-storm,  a  number  of  hermit-thrushes  have  taken 
shelter  in  my  unfinished  chambers.  Indeed,  I  am  in 
the  midst  of  friends  before  I  fairly  know  it.  The 
place  is  not  so  new  as  I  had  thought.  It  is  already 
old ;  the  birds  have  supplied  the  memories  of  many 
decades  of  years. 

There  is  something  almost  pathetic  in  the  fact  that 


A  BIRD   MEDLEY.  87 

the  birds  remain  forever  the  same.  You  grow  old, 
your  friends  die  or  move  to  distant  lands,  events 
sweep  on  and  all  things  are  changed.  Yet  there  in 
your  garden  or  orchard  are  the  birds  of  your  boy- 
hood, the  same  notes,  the  same  calls,  and,  to  all  in- 
tents and  purposes,  the  identical  birds  endowed  with 
perennial  youth.  The  swallows,  that  built  so  far  out 
of  your  reach  beneath  the  eaves  of  your  father's 
barn,  the  same  ones  now  squeak  and  chatter  beneath 
the  eaves  of  your  barn.  The  warblers  and  shy 
wood-birds  you  pursued  with  such  glee  ever  so  many 
summers  ago,  and  whose  names  you  taught  to  some 
beloved  youth  who  now,  perchance,  sleeps  amid  his 
native  hills,  no  marks  of  time  or  change  cling  to 
them  ;  and  when  you  walk  out  to  the  strange  woods, 
there  they  are,  mocking  you  with  their  ever-renewed 
and  joyous  youth.  The  call  of  the  high-holes,  the 
whistle  of  the  quail,  the  strong  piercing  note  of  the 
meadow-lark,  the  drumming  of  the  grouse,  —  how 
these  sounds  ignore  the  years,  and  strike  on  the  ear 
with  the  melody  of  that  spring-time  when  the  world 
was  young,  and  life  was  all  holiday  and  romance  ! 

During  any  unusual  tension  of  the  feelings  or 
emotions,  how  the  note  or  song  of  a  single  bird  will 
sink  into  the  memory,  and  become  inseparably  asso- 
ciated with  your  grief  or  joy  !  Shall  I  ever  again 
be  able  to  hear  the  song  of  the  oriole  without  being 
pierced  through  and  through  ?  Can  it  ever  be  other 
than  a  dirge  for  the  dead  to  me  ?  Day  after  day,  and 
week  after  week,  this  bird  whistled  and  warbled  in  a 


88  A   BIRD   MEDLEY. 

mulberry  by  the  door,  while  sorrow,  like  a  pall,  dark- 
ened my  day.  So  loud  and  persistent  was  the  singer 
that  his  note  teased  and  worried  my  excited  ear. 

"  Hearken  to  yon  pine  warbler, 
Singing  aloft  in  the  tree ! 
Hearest  thou,  O  traveler ! 
What  he  singeth  to  me? 

"Not  unless  God  made  sharp  thine  ear 
"With  sorrow  such  as  mine, 
Out  of  that  delicate  lay  couldst  thou 
Its  heavy  tale  divine." 

It  is  the  opinion  of  some  naturalists  that  birds 
never  die  what  is  called  a  natural  death,  but  come 
to  their  end  by  some  murderous  or  accidental 
means ;  yet  I  have  found  sparrows  and  vireos  in  the 
fields  and  woods  dead  or  dying,  that  bore  no  marks 
of  violence ;  and  I  remember  that  once  in  my  child- 
hood a  red-bird  fell  down  in  the  yard  exhausted  and 
was  brought  in  by  the  girl ;  its  bright  scarlet  image 
is  indelibly  stamped  upon  my  recollection.  It  is  not 
known  that  birds  have  any  distempers  like  the  do- 
mestic fowls,  but  I  saw  a  social  sparrow  one  day  quite 
disabled  by  some  curious  malady,  that  suggested  a 
disease  that  sometimes  attacks  poultry  ;  one  eye  was 
nearly  put  out  by  a  scrofulous  looking  sore,  and  on 
the  last  joint  of  one  wing  there  was  a  large  tumor- 
ous or  fungous  growth  that  crippled  the  bird  com- 
pletely. On  another  occasion  I  picked  up  one  that 
appeared  well  but  could  not  keep  its  centre  of  grav- 
ity when  in  flight,  and  so  fell  to  the  ground. 


A   BIRD   MEDLEY.  89 

One  reason  why  dead  birds  and  animals  are  so 
rarely  found  is,  that  on  the  approach  of  death  their 
instinct  prompts  them  to  creep  away  in  some  hole  or 
under  some  cover,  where  they  would  be  least  liable 
to  fall  a  prey  to  their  natural  enemies.  It  is  doubt- 
ful if  any  of  the  game  birds,  like  the  pigeon  and 
grouse,  ever  die  of  old  age,  or  the  semi-game  birds, 
like  the  bobolink,  or  the  "  century  living  "  crow;  but 
in  what  other  form  can  death  overtake  the  humming- 
bird, or  even  the  swift  and  the  barn-swallow  ?  Such 
are  true  birds  of  the  air ;  they  may  be  occasionally 
lost  at  sea  during  their  migrations,  but,  so  far  as  I 
know,  they  are  not  preyed  upon  by  any  other  spe- 
cies. 

The  valley  of  the  Hudson,  I  find,  forms  a  great 
natural  highway  for  the  birds,  as  do  doubtless  the 
Connecticut,  the  Susquehanna,  the  Delaware,  and  all 
other  large  water-courses  running  north  and  south. 
The  birds  love  an  easy  way,  and  in  the  valleys  of  the 
rivers  they  find  a  road  already  graded  for  them ;  and 
they  abound  more  in  such  places  throughout  the  sea- 
son than  they  do  farther  inland.  The  swarms  of 
robins  that  come  to  us  in  early  spring  are  a  delight 
to  behold.     In  one  of  his  poems  Emerson  speaks  of 

"  April's  bird, 
Blue-coated,  flying  before  from  tree  to  tree; " 

but  April's  bird  with  me  is  the  robin,  brisk,  vocif- 
erous, musical,  dotting  every  field,  and  larking  it  in 
every  grove ;  he  is  as  easily  atop  at  this  season  as  the 
bobolink  is  a  month  or  two  later.    The  tints  of  April 


90  A   BIRD  MEDLEY. 

are  ruddy  and  brown  —  the  new  furrow  and  the  leaf- 
less trees,  and  these  are  the  tints  of  its  dominant  bird. 

From  my  dining-room  window  I  look,  or  did  look, 
out  upon  a  long  stretch  of  smooth  meadow,  and  as 
pretty  a  spring  sight  as  I  ever  wish  to  behold  was  this 
field,  sprinkled  all  over  with  robins,  their  red  breasts 
turned  toward  the  morning  sun,  or  their  pert  forms 
sharply  outlined  against  lingering  patches  of  snow. 
Every  morning  for  weeks  I  had  those  robins  for 
breakfast ;  but  what  they  had  I  never  could  find  out. 

After  the  leaves  are  out  and  gayer  colors  come 
into  fashion,  the  robin  takes  a  back  seat.  He  goes 
to  housekeeping  in  the  old  apple-tree,  or,  what  he 
likes  better,  the  cherry-tree.  A  pair  reared  their  do- 
mestic altar  (of  mud  and  dry  grass)  in  one  of  the 
latter  trees,  where  I  saw  much  of  them.  The  cock 
took  it  upon  himself  to  keep  the  tree  free  of  all  other 
robins  during  cherry  time,  and  its  branches  were  the 
scene  of  some  lively  tussles  every  hour  in  the  day. 
The  innocent  visitor  would  scarcely  alight  before  the 
jealous  cock  was  upon  him ;  but  while  he  was  thrust- 
ing the  intruder  out  at  one  side,  a  second  would  be 
coming  in  on  the  other.  He  managed,  however,  to 
protect  his  cherries  very  well,  but  had  so  little  time, 
to  eat  the  fruit  himself,  that  we  got  fully  our  share. 

I  have  frequently  seen  the  robin  courting,  and  have 
always  been  astonished  and  amused  at  the  utter  cold- 
ness and  indifference  of  the  female.  The  females  of 
every  species  of  birds,  however,  I  believe,  have  this 
in  common  —  they  are  absolutely  free  from  coquetry, 


A   BIRD  MEDLEY.  91 

or  any  airs  and  wiles  whatever.  In  most  cases  nature 
has  given  the  song  and  the  plumage  to  the  other  sex, 
and  all  the  embellishing  and  acting  is  done  by  the 
male  bird. 

I  am  always  at  home  when  I  see  the  passenger- 
pigeon.  Few  spectacles  please  me  more  than  to  see 
clouds  of  these  birds  sweeping  across  the  sky,  and 
few  sounds  are  more  agreeable  to  my  ear  than  their 
lively  piping  and  calling  in  the  spring  woods.  They 
come  in  such  multitudes,  they  people  the  whole  air ; 
they  cover  townships,  and  make  the  solitary  places  gay 
as  with  a  festival.  The  naked  woods  are  suddenly 
blue  as  with  fluttering  ribbons  and  scarfs,  and  vocal 
as  with  the  voices  of  children.  Their  arrival  is  al- 
ways unexpected.  We  know  April  will  bring  the 
robins  and  May  the  bobolinks,  but  we  do  not  know 
that  either  they,  or  any  other  month,  will  bring  the  pas- 
senger-pigeon. Sometimes  years  elapse  and  scarcely 
a  flock  is  seen.  Then,  of  a  sudden,  some  March  or 
April  they  come  pouring  over  the  horizon  from  the 
south  or  southwest,  and  for  a  few  days  the  land  is 
alive  with  them. 

The  whole  race  seems  to  be  collected  in  a  few  vast 
swarms  or  assemblages.  Indeed,  I  have  sometimes 
thought  there  was  only  one  such  in  the  United  States, 
and  that  it  moved  in  squads,  and  regiments,  and  brig- 
ades, and  divisions,  like  a  giant  army.  The  scouting 
and  foraging  squads  are  not  unusual,  and  every  few 
years  we  see  larger  bodies  of  them,  but  rarely,  indeed, 
do  we  witness  the  spectacle  of  the  whole  vast  tribe  in 


92  A  BIRD  MEDLEY. 

motion.  Sometimes  we  hear  of  them  in  Virginia,  or 
Kentucky  and  Tennessee  ;  then  in  Ohio  or  Pennsyl- 
vania ;  then  in  New  York,  then  in  Canada  or  Michi- 
gan or  Missouri.  They  are  followed  from  point  to 
point,  and  from  State  to  State,  by  human  sharks,  who 
catch  and  shoot  them  for  market. 

A  year  ago  last  April,  the  pigeons  flew  for  two  or 
three  days  up  and  down  the  Hudson.  In  long  bow- 
ing lines,  or  else  in  dense  masses,  they  moved  across 
the  sky.  It  was  not  the  whole  army,  but  I  should 
think  at  least  one  corps  of  it ;  I  had  not  seen  such  a 
flight  of  pigeons  since  my  boyhood.  I  went  up  to 
the  top  of  the  house,  the  better  to.  behold  the  winged 
procession.  The  day  seemed  memorable  and  poetic 
in  which  such  sights  occurred. 

While  I  was  looking  at  the  pigeons,  a  flock  of  wild 
geese  went  by,  harrowing  the  sky  northward.  The 
geese  strike  a  deeper  chord  than  the  pigeons.  Level 
and  straight  they  go  as  fate  to  its  mark.  I  cannot 
tell  what  emotions  these  migrating  birds  awaken  in 
me  —  the  geese  especially.  One  seldom  sees  more 
than  a  flock  or  two  in  a  season,  and  what  a  spring 
token  it  is  !  The  great  bodies  are  in  motion.  It  is 
like  the  passage  of  a  victorious  army.  No  longer 
inch  by  inch  does  spring  come,  but  these  geese  ad- 
vance the  standard  across  zones  at  one  pull.  How 
my  desire  goes  with  them ;  how  something  in  me, 
wild  and  migratory,  plumes  itself  and  follows  fast ! 

"  Steering  north,  with  raucous  cry, 
Through  tracts  and  provinces  of  sky, 


A   BIRD   MEDLEY.  93 

Every  night  alighting  down 
In  new  landscapes  of  romance, 
Where  darkling  feed  the  clamorous  clans 
By  lonely  lakes  to  men  unknown." 

Dwelling  upon  these  sights,  I  am  reminded  that 
the  seeing  of  spring  come,  not  only  upon  the  great 
wings  of  the  geese  and  the  lesser  wings  of  the  pig- 
eons and  birds,  but  in  the  many  more  subtle  and  in- 
direct signs  and  mediums,  is  also  a  part  of  the  com- 
pensation of  living  in  the  country.  I  enjoy  not  less 
what  may  be  called  the  negative  side  of  spring  — 
those  dark,  dank,  dissolving  days  —  yellow  sposh  and 
mud  and  water  everywhere,  —  yet  who  can  stay  long 
indoors  ?  The  humidity  is  soft  and  satisfying  to  the 
smell,  and  to  the  face  and  hands,  and,  for  the  first  time 
for  months,  there  is  the  fresh  odor  of  the  earth.  The 
air  is  full  of  the  notes  and  calls  of  the  first  birds. 
The  domestic  fowls  refuse  their  accustomed  food  and 
wander  far  from  the  barn.  Is  it  something  winter  has 
left,  or  spring  has  dropped,  that  they  pick  up  ?  And 
what  is  it  that  holds  me  so  long  standing  in  the  yard 
or  in  the  fields  ?  Something  besides  the  ice  and  snow 
melts  and  runs  away  with  the  spring  floods. 

The  little  sparrows  and  purple  finches  are  so 
punctual  in  announcing  spring,  that  some  seasons 
one  wonders  how  they  know  without  looking  in  the 
almanac,  for  surely  there  are  no  signs  of  spring  out 
of  doors.  Yet  they  will  strike  up  as  cheerily  amid 
the  driving  snow  as  if  they  had  just  been  told  that 
to-morrow  is  the  first  day  of  March.    About  the  same 


94  A   BIRD   MEDLEY. 

time  I  notice  the  potatoes  in  the  cellar  show  signs  of 
sprouting.  They,  too,  find  out  so  quickly  when 
spring  is  near.  Spring  comes  by  two  routes  —  in  the 
air  and  under  ground,  and  often  gets  here  by  the  lat- 
ter course  first.  She  undermines  winter,  when  out- 
wardly his  front  is  nearly  as  bold  as  ever.  I  have 
known  the  trees  to  bud  long  before,  by  outward  ap- 
pearances, one  would  expect  them  to.  The  frost  was 
gone  from  the  ground  before  the  snow  was  gone  from 
the  surface. 

But  winter  hath  his  birds  also ;  some  of  them  such 
tiny  bodies,  that  one  wonders  how  they  withstand  the 
giant  cold  —  but  they  do.  Birds  live  on  highly  con- 
centrated food  —  the  fine  seeds  of  weeds  and  grasses, 
and  the  eggs  and  larvae  of  insects.  Such  food  must 
be  very  stimulating  and  heating.  A  gizzard  full  of 
ants,  for  instance,  what  spiced  and  seasoned  extract  is 
equal  to  that  ?  Think  what  virtue  there  must  be  in 
an  ounce  of  gnats  or  mosquitoes,  or  in  the  fine  mys- 
terious food  the  chickadee  and  brown-creeper  gather 
in  the  winter  woods.  It  is  doubtful  if  these  birds 
ever  freeze  when  fuel  enough  can  be  had  to  keep 
their  little  furnaces  going.  And,  as  they  get  their 
food  entirely  from  the  limbs  and  trunks  of  trees,  like 
the  woodpeckers,  their  supply  is  seldom  interfered 
with  by  the  snow.  The  worst  annoyance  must  be 
the  enameling  of  ice  our  winter  woods  sometimes 
get. 

Indeed,  the  food  question  seems  to  be  the  only  se- 
rious one  with  the  birds.     Give  them  plenty  to  eat, 


A  BIRD   MEDLEY.  95 

and,  no  doubt,  the  majority  of  them  would  face  our 
winters.  I  believe  all  the  woodpeckers  are  winter 
birds,  except  the  high-hole  or  yellow-hammer,  and  he 
obtains  the  greater  part  of  his  subsistence  from  the 
ground,  and  is  not  a  woodpecker  at  all  in  his  habits  of 
feeding.  Were  it  not  that  it  has  recourse  to  budding, 
the  ruffed  grouse  would  be  obliged  to  migrate.  The 
quail,  a  bird,  no  doubt,  equally  hardy,  but  whose  food 
is  at  the  mercy  of  the  snow,  is  frequently  cut  off  by 
our  severe  winters  when  it  ventures  to  brave  them, 
which  is  not  often.  Where  plenty  of  the  berries  of 
the  red  cedar  can  be  had,  the  cedar-bird  will  pass  the 
winter  in  New  York.  The  old  ornithologists  say  the 
bluebird  migrates  to  Bermuda ;  but  in  the  winter  of 
1874-75,  severe  as  it  was,  a  pair  of  them  wintered 
with  me  eighty  miles  north  of  New  York  city.  They 
seem  to  have  been  decided  in  their  choice  by  the  at- 
tractions of  my  rustic  porch  and  the  fruit  of  a  sugar- 
berry  tree  (celtis  —  a  kind  of  lotus)  that  stood  in 
front  of  it.  They  lodged  in  the  porch  and  took 
their  meals  in  the  tree.  Indeed,  they  became  reg- 
ular lotus-eaters.  Punctually  at  dusk  they  were  in 
their  places  on  a  large  laurel  root  in  the  top  of  the 
porch,  whence,  however,  they  were  frequently  routed 
by  an  indignant  broom  that  was  jealous  of  the  neat- 
ness of  the  porch  floor.  But  the  pair  would  not  take 
any  hints  of  this  kind,  and  did  not  give  up  their  quar- 
ters in  the  porch  or  their  lotus  berries  till  spring. 

Many  times  during  the  winter  the  sugar-berry  tree 
was  visited  by  a  flock  of  cedar-birds  that  also  win- 


96  A  BIRD  MEDLEY. 

tered  in  the  vicinity.  At  such  times  it  was  amusing 
to  witness  the  pretty  wrath  of  the  bluebirds,  scolding 
and  threatening  the  intruders,  and  begrudging  them 
every  berry  they  ate.  The  bluebird  cannot  utter 
a  harsh  or  unpleasing  note.  Indeed,  he  seems  to 
have  but  one  language,  one  speech,  for  both  love  and 
war,  and  the  expression  of  his  indignation  is  nearly 
as  musical  as  his  song.  The  male  frequently  made 
hostile  demonstrations  toward  the  cedar-birds,  but  did 
not  openly  attack  them,  and,  with  his  mate,  appeared 
to  experience  great  relief  when  the  poachers  had 
gone. 

I  had  other  company  in  my  solitude  also,  among 
the  rest  a  distinguished  arrival  from  the  far  North, 
the  pine  grossbeak,  a  bird  rarely  seen  in  these  parts, 
except  now  and  then  a  single  specimen.  But  in  the 
winter  of  1875,  heralding  the  extreme  cold  weather, 
and,  no  doubt,  in  consequence  of  it,  there  was  a  large 
incursion  of  them  into  this  State  and  New  England. 
They  attracted  the  notice  of  the  country  people  every- 
where. I  first  saw  them  early  in  December  about  the 
head  of  the  Delaware.  I  was  walking  along  a  cleared 
ridge  with  my  gun,  just  at  sundown,  when  I  beheld 
two  strange  birds  sitting  in  a  small  maple.  On  bring- 
ing one  of  them  down,  I  found  it  was  a  bird  I  had 
never  before  seen  ;  in  color  and  shape  like  the  purple 
finch,  but  quite  as  large  again  in  size.  From  its 
heavy  beak,  I  at  once  recognized  it  as  belonging  to  the 
family  of  grossbeaks.  A  few  days  later  I  saw  large 
numbers  of  them  in  the  woods,  on  the  ground,  and  in 


A  BIRD  MEDLEY.  97 

the  trees.  And  still  later,  and  on  till  February,  they 
were  very  numerous  on  the  Hudson,  coming  all  about 
my  house  —  more  familiar  even  than  the  little  snow- 
bird, hopping  beneath  the  windows,  and  looking  up 
at  me  apparently  with  as  much  curiosity  as  I  looked 
down  upon  them.  They  fed  on  the  buds  of  the 
sugar-maples  and  upon  frozen  apples  in  the  orchard. 
They  were  mostly  young  birds  and  females,  colored 
very  much  like  the  common  sparrow,  with  now  and 
then  visible  the  dull  carmine-colored  head  and  neck 
of  an  old  male. 

Other  Northern  visitors  that  tarried  with  me  the 
same  winter  were  the  tree  or  Canada  sparrow  and  the 
red-poll,  the  former  a  bird  larger  than  the  social  spar- 
row or  hair-bircl,  but  otherwise  much  resembling  it, 
and  distinguishable  by  a  dark  spot  in  the  middle  of 
its  breast ;  the  latter  a  bird  the  size  and  shape  of  the 
common  goldfinch,  with  the  same  manner  of  flight  and 
nearly  the  same  note  or  cry,  but  darker  than  the 
winter  plumage  of  the  goldfinch,  and  with  a  red 
crown  and  a  tinge  of  red  on  the  breast.  Little  bands 
of  these  two  species  lurked  about  the  barn-yard  all 
winter  picking  up  the  hay-seed,  the  sparrow  some- 
times venturing  in  on  the  hay-mow  when  the  supply 
outside  was  short.  I  felt  grateful  to  them  for  their 
company.  They  gave  a  sort  of  ornithological  air  to 
every  errand  I  had  to  the  barn. 

Though  a  number  of  birds  face  our  winters,  and  by 
various  shifts  worry  through  till  spring,  some  of  them 
permanent  residents,  and  some  of  them  visitors  from 
7 


98  A  BIRD  MEDLEY. 

the  far  North,  yet  there  is  but  one  genuine  snow- 
bird, nursling  of  the  snow,  and  that  is  the  snow-bunt- 
ing, a  bird  that  seems  proper  to  this  season,  heralding 
the  coming  storm,  sweeping  by  on  bold  and  rapid 
wing,  and  calling  and  chirping  as  cheerily  as  the 
songsters  of  May.  In  its  plumage  it  reflects  the 
winter  landscape  —  an  expanse  of  white  surmounted 
or  streaked  with  gray  and  brown ;  a  field  of  snow 
with  a  line  of  woods  or  a  tinge  of  stubble.  It  fits 
into  the  scene,  and  does  not  appear  to  lead  a  beggarly 
and  disconsolate  life,  like  most  of  our  winter  resi- 
dents. During  the  ice-harvesting  on  the  river,  I  see 
them  flitting  about  among  the  gangs  of  men,  or  float- 
ing on  the  cakes  of  ice  picking  and  scratching  amid 
the  droppings  of  the  horses.  They  love  the  stack 
and  hay-barn  in  the  distant  field,  where  the  farmer 
fodders  his  cattle  upon  the  snow,  and  every  red  root, 
rag-weed,  or  pig-weed  left  standing  in  the  fall  adds  to 
their  winter  stores. 

Though  this  bird,  and  one  or  two  others,  like  the 
chickadee  and  nut-hatch,  are  more  or  less  complacent 
and  cheerful  during  the  winter,  yet  no  bird  can  look 
our  winters  in  the  face  and  sing,  as  do  so  many  of 
the  English  birds.  Several  species  in  Great  Britain, 
their  biographers  tell  us,  sing  the  winter  through,  ex- 
cept during  the  severest  frosts ;  but  with  us  as  far 
south  as  Virginia,  and,  for  aught  I  know,  much  far- 
ther, the  birds  are  tuneless  at  this  season.  The  owls, 
even,  do  not  hoot,  nor  the  hawks  scream. 

Among  the  birds  that  tarry  briefly  with  us  in  the 


A   BIRD   MEDLEY.  99 

spring  on  their  way  to  Canada  and  beyond,  there  is 
none  I  behold  with  so  much  pleasure  as  the  white- 
crowned  sparrow.  I  have  an  eye  out  for  him  all 
through  April  and  the  first  week  in  May.  He  is  the 
rarest  and  most  beautiful  of  the  sparrow  kind.  He 
is  crowned  as  some  hero  or  victor  in  the  games.  He 
is  usually  in  company  with  his  congener,  the  white- 
throated  sparrow,  but  seldom  more  than  in  the  pro- 
portion of  one  to  twenty  of  the  latter.  Contrasted 
with  this  bird,  he  looks  like  its  more  fortunate  brother, 
upon  whom  some  special  distinction  has  been  con- 
ferred, and  who  is,  from  the  egg,  of  finer  make  and 
quality.  His  sparrow  color  of  ashen  gray  and  brown 
is  very  clear  and  bright,  and  his  form  graceful.  His 
whole  expression,  however,  culminates  in  a  singular 
manner  in  his  crown.  The  various  tints  of  the  bird 
are  brought  to  a  focus  here  and  intensified,  the  lighter 
ones  becoming  white,  and  the  deeper  ones  nearly 
black.  There  is  the  suggestion  of  a  crest  also,  from 
a  habit  the  bird  has  of  slightly  elevating  this  part  of 
its  plumage,  as  if  to  make  more  conspicuous  its  pretty 
markings.  They  are  great  scratchers,  and  will  often 
remain  several  minutes  scratching  in  one  place,  like 
a  hen.  Yet,  unlike  the  hen  and  like  all  hoppers, 
they  scratch  with  both  feet  at  once,  which  is  by  no 
means  the  best  way  to  scratch. 

The  white-throats  often  sing  during  their  sojourn- 
ing in  both  fall  and  spring ;  but  only  on  one  occasion 
have  I  ever  heard  any  part  of  the  song  of  the  white- 
crowned,  and  that  proceeded  from  what  I  took  to  be 


100  A  BIRD   MEDLEY. 

a  young  male,  one  October  morning,  just  as  the  sun 
was  rising.  It  was  pitched  very  low,  like  a  half- 
forgotten  air,  but  it  was  very  sweet.  It  was  the  song 
of  the  vesper-sparrow  and  the  white-throat  in  one. 
In  his  breeding  haunts  he  must  be  a  superior  song- 
ster, but  he  is  very  chary  of  his  music  while  on  his 
travels. 

The  sparrows  are  all  meek  and  lowly  birds.  They 
are  of  the  grass,  the  fences,  the  low  bushes,  the  weedy 
way-side  places.  Nature  has  denied  them  all  brill- 
iant tints,  but  she  has  given  them  sweet  and  musical 
voices.  Theirs  are  the  quaint  and  simple  lullaby 
songs  of  childhood.  The  white-throat  has  a  timid, 
tremulous  strain,  that  issues  from  the  low  bushes  or 
from  behind  the  fence,  where  its  cradle  is  hid.  The 
song-sparrow  modulates  its  simple  ditty  as  softly  as 
the  lining  of  its  own  nest.  The  vesper-sparrow  has 
only  peace  and  gentleness  in  its  strain. 

What  pretty  nests,  too,  the  sparrows  build !  Can 
anything  be  more  exquisite  than  a  sparrow's  nest 
under  a  grassy  or  mossy  bank  ?  What  care  the  bird 
has  taken  not  to  disturb  one  straw  or  spear  of  grass, 
or  thread  of  moss !  You  cannot  approach  it  and  put 
your  hand  into  it  without  violating  the  place  more  or 
less,  and  yet  the  little  architect  has  wrought  day  after 
day  and  left  no  marks.  There  has  been  an  excava- 
tion, and  yet  no  grain  of  earth  appears  to  have  been 
moved.  If  the  nest  had  slowly  and  silently  grown 
like  the  grass  and  the  moss,  it  could  not  have  been 
more  nicely  adjusted  to  its  place  and  surroundings. 


A  BIRD   MEDLEY.  101 

There  is  absolutely  nothing  to  tell  the  eye  it  is  there. 
Generally  a  few  spears  of  dry  grass  fall  down  from 
the  turf  above  and  form  a  slight  screen  before  it. 
How  commonly  and  coarsely  it  begins,  blending  with 
the  debris  that  lies  about,  and  how  it  refines  and 
comes  into  form  as  it  approaches  the  centre,  which  is 
modeled  so  perfectly  and  lined  so  softly !  Then,  when 
the  full  complement  of  eggs  is  laid,  and  nidification 
has  fairly  begun,  what  a  sweet,  pleasing  little  mystery 
the  silent  old  bank  holds  ! 

The  song-sparrow,  whose  nest  I  have  been  describ- 
ing, displays  a  more  marked  individuality  in  its  song 
than  any  bird  with  which  I  am  acquainted.  Birds  of 
the  same  species  generally  all  sing  alike,  but  I  have 
observed  numerous  song-sparrows  with  songs  pecul- 
iarly their  own.  Last  season,  the  whole  summer 
through,  one  sang  about  my  grounds  like  this: 
swee-e-t,  swee-e-t,  swee-e-t,  bitter.  Day  after  day,  from 
May  to  September,  I  heard  this  strain,  which  I 
thought  a  simple,  but  very  profound  summing-up  of 
life,  and  wondered  how  the  little  bird  had  learned  it 
so  quickly.  The  present  season,  I  heard  another  with 
a  song  equally  original,  but  not  so  easily  worded. 
Among  a  large  troop  of  them  in  April,  my  attention 
was  attracted  to  one  that  was  a  master  songster  — 
some  Shelley  or  Tennyson  among  his  kind.  The 
strain  was  remarkably  prolonged,  intricate,  and  ani- 
mated, and  far  surpassed  anything  I  ever  before  heard 
from  that  source. 

But  the  most  noticeable  instance  of  departure  from 


102  A   BIRD   MEDLEY. 

the  standard  song  of  a  species  I  ever  knew  of,  was  in 
the  case  of  a  wood-thrush.  The  bird  sang,  as  did  the 
sparrow,  the  whole  season  through,  at  the  foot  of  my 
lot  near  the  river.  The  song  began  correctly  and 
ended  correctly  ;  but,  interjected  into  it  about  midway, 
was  a  loud,  piercing,  artificial  note,  at  utter  variance 
with  the  rest  of  the  strain.  When  my  ear  first  caught 
this  singular  note,  I  started  out,  not  a  little  puzzled, 
to  make,  as  I  supposed,  a  new  acquaintance,  but  had 
not  gone  far  when  I  discovered  whence  it  proceeded. 
Brass  amid  gold,  or  pebbles  amid  pearls,  are  not 
more  out  of  place  than  was  this  discordant  scream  or 
cry  in  the  melodious  strain  of  the  wood- thrush.  It 
pained  and  startled  the  ear.  It  seemed  as  if  the  in- 
strument of  the  bird  was  not  under  control,  or  else 
that  one  note  was  sadly  out  of  tune,  and,  when  its 
turn  came,  instead  of  giving  forth  one  of  those  sounds 
that  are  indeed  like  pearls,  it  shocked  the  ear  with  a 
piercing  discord.  Yet  the  singer  appeared  entirely 
unconscious  of  the  defect ;  or  had  he  grown  used  to 
it,  or  had  his  friends  persuaded  him  that  it  was  a 
variation  to  be  coveted  ?  Sometimes,  after  the  brood 
had  hatched  and  the  bird's  pride  was  at  its  full,  he 
would  make  a  little  triumphal  tour  of  the  locality, 
coming  from  under  the  hill  quite  up  to  the  house  and 
flaunting  his  cracked  instrument  in  the  face  of  who- 
ever would  listen.  He  did  not  return  again  the  next 
season ;  or,  if  he  did,  the  malformation  of  his  song 
was  gone. 

I  have  noticed  that  the  bobolink  does  not  sing  the 


A   BIRD   MEDLEY.  103 

same  in  different  localities.  In  New  Jersey  it  has  one 
song ;  on  the  Hudson  a  slight  variation  of  the  same, 
and  on  the  high  grass  lands  of  the  interior  of  the 
State,  quite  a  different  strain, — -clearer,  more  dis- 
tinctly articulated,  and  running  off  with  more  sparkle 
and  liltingness.  It  reminds  one  of  the  clearer  mount- 
ain air  and  the  translucent  spring  water  of  those 
localities.  I  never  could  make  out  what  the  bobolink 
says  in  New  Jersey,  but  in  certain  districts  in  this 
State  his  enunciation  is  quite  distinct.  Sometimes 
he  begins  with  the  word  gegue,  gegue.  Then  again, 
more  fully,  be  true  to  me,  Clarsy,  be  true  to  me,  Clarsy, 
Clarsy,  thence  full  tilt  into  his  inimitable  song,  inter- 
spersed in  which  the  words  kick  your  slipper,  kick 
your  slipper,  and  temperance,  temperance  (the  last 
with  a  peculiar  nasal  resonance),  are  plainly  heard. 
At  its  best,  it  is  a  remarkable  performance,  a  unique 
performance,  as  it  contains  not  the  slightest  hint  or 
suggestion,  either  in  tone,  or  manner,  or  effect,  of  any 
other  bird-song  to  be  heard.  The  bobolink  has  no 
mate  or  parallel  in  any  part  of  the  world.  He  stands 
alone.  There  is  no  closely  allied  species.  He  is  not 
a  lark,  nor  a  finch,  nor  a  warbler,  nor  a  thrush,  nor 
a  starling  (though  classed  with  the  starlings  by  late 
naturalists).  He  is  an  exception  to  many  well-known 
rules.  He  is  the  only  ground-biid  known  to  me  of 
marked  and  conspicuous  plumage.  He  is  the  only 
black-and-white  bird  we  have  east  of  the  Mississippi, 
and  what  is  still  more  odd,  he  is  black  beneath  and 
white   above  —  the  reverse  of  the   fact  in  all  other 


104  A   BIRD   MEDLEY. 

cases.  Preeminently  a  bird  of  the  meadow  during 
the  breeding  season,  and  associated  with  clover,  and 
daisies,  and  buttercups,  as  no  other  bird  is,  he  yet  has 
the  look  of  an  interloper  or  a  new-comer,  and  not  of 
one  to  the  manor  born. 

The  bobolink  has  an  unusually  full  throat,  which 
may  help  account  for  his  great  power  of  song.  No 
bird  has  yet  been  found  that  could  imitate  him  or 
even  repeat  or  suggest  a  single  note,  as  if  his  song 
were  the  product  of  a  new  set  of  organs.  There  is 
a  vibration  about  it  and  a  rapid  running  over  the 
keys  that  is  the  despair  of  other  songsters.  It  is  said 
that  the  mocking-bird  is  dumb  in  the  presence  of  the 
bobolink.  My  neighbor  has  an  English  skylark  that 
was  hatched  and  reared  in  captivity.  The  bird  is  a 
most  persistent  and  vociferous  songster,  and  fully  as 
successful  a  mimic  as  the  mocking-bird.  It  pours 
out  a  strain  that  is  a  regular  mosaic  of  nearly  all 
the  bird-notes  to  be  heard,  its  own  proper  lark  song 
forming  a  kind  of  bordering  for  the  whole.  The  notes 
of  the  phoebe-bird,  the  purple  finch,  the  swallow,  the 
yellow-bird,  the  king-bird,  the  robin,  and  others,  are 
rendered  with  perfect  distinctness  and  accuracy,  but 
not  a  word  of  the  bobolink's,  though  the  lark  must 
have  heard  its  song  every  day  for  four  successive 
summers.  It  was  the  one  conspicuous  note  in  the 
fields  around  that  the  lark  made  no  attempt  to  pla- 
giarize.    He  could  not  steal  the  bobolink's  thunder. 

The  lark  is  only  a  more  marvelous  songster  than 
the  bobolink  on  account  of  his  soaring  flight,  and  the 


A  BIRD  MEDLEY.  105 

sustained  copiousness  of  his  song.  His  note  is  rasp- 
ing and  harsh,  in  point  of  melody,  when  compared 
with  the  bobolink's.  When  caged  and  near  at  hand 
the  lark's  song  is  positively  disagreeable ;  it  is  so  loud 
and  full  of  sharp,  aspirated  sounds.  But  high  in  air 
above  the  broad  downs,  poured  out  without  interrup- 
tion for  many  minutes  together,  it  is  very  agreeable. 

The  bird  among  us  that  is  usually  called  a  lark, 
namely,  the  meadow-lark,  but  which  our  later  classi- 
fiers say  is  no  lark  at  all,  has  nearly  the  same  quality 
of  voice  as  the  English  skylark  —  loud,  piercing, 
z-z-ing ;  and  during  the  mating  season  it  frequently 
indulges  while  on  the  wing  in  a  brief  song  that  is 
quite  lark-like.  It  is  also  a  bird  of  the  stubble,  and 
one  of  the  last  to  retreat  on  the  approach  of  winter. 

The  habits  of  many  of  our  birds  are  slowly  under- 
going a  change.  Their  migrations  are  less  marked. 
With  the  settlement  and  cultivation  of  the  country 
the  means  of  subsistence  of  nearly  every  species  are 
vastly  increased.  Insects  are  more  numerous,  and 
seeds  of  weeds  and  grasses  more  abundant.  They 
become  more  and  more  domestic  like  the  English 
birds.  The  swallows  have  nearly  all  left  their  orig- 
inal abodes,  —  hollow  trees,  and  cliffs,  and  rocks,  — 
for  human  habitations  and  their  environments. 
Where  did  the  barn-swallow  nest  before  the  country 
was  settled  ?  The  chimney-swallow  nested  in  hollow 
trees,  and,  perhaps,  occasionally  resorts  thither  yet 
But  the  chimney,  notwithstanding  the  smoke,  seems 
to  suit  his  taste  best.     In  the  spring,  before  they  have 


106  A  BIRD   MEDLEY. 

paired,  I  think  these  swallows  sometimes  pass  the 
night  in  the  woods,  but  not  if  an  old  disused  chim- 
ney is  handy. 

One  evening  in  early  May  my  attention  was  ar- 
rested by  a  band  of  them  containing  several  hundred, 
perhaps  a  thousand,  circling  about  near  a  large,  tall, 
disused  chimney  in  a  secluded  place  in  the  country. 
They  were  very  lively,  and  chippering,  and  diving  in 
a  most  extraordinary  manner.  They  formed  a  broad 
continuous  circle  many  rods  in  diameter.  Gradually 
the  circle  contracted  and  neared  the  chimney.  Pres- 
ently some  of  the  birds  as  they  came  round  began  to 
dive  toward  it,  and  the  chippering  was  more  animated 
than  ever.  Then  a  few  ventured  in ;  in  a  moment 
more,  the  air  at  the  mouth  of  the  chimney  was  black 
with  the  stream  of  descending  swallows.  When  the 
passage  began  to  get  crowded,  the  circle  lifted  and 
the  rest  of  the  birds  continued  their  flight,  giving 
those  inside  time  to  dispose  of  themselves.  Then 
the  influx  began  again  and  was  kept  up  till  the  crowd 
became  too  great,  when  it  cleared  as  before.  Thus 
by  installments,  or  in  layers,  the  swallows  were 
packed  into  the  chimney  until  the  last  one  was 
stowed  away.  Passing  by  the  place  a  few  days  af- 
terward, I  saw  a  board  reaching  from  the  roof  of  the 
building  to  the  top  of  the  chimney,  and  imagined 
some  curious  person  or  some  predacious  boy  had  been 
up  to  take  a  peep  inside,  and  see  how  so  many  swal- 
lows could  dispose  of  themselves  in  such  a  space.  It 
would  have  been  an  interesting  spectacle  to  see  them 
emerge  from  the  chimney  in  the  morning. 


APRIL. 


APRIL. 

If  we  represent  the  winter  of  our  northern  climate 
by  a  rugged  snow-clad  mountain,  and  summer  by  a 
broad  fertile  plain,  then  the  intermediate  belt,  the 
hilly  and  breezy  uplands,  will  stand  for  spring,  with 
March  reaching  well  up  into  the  region  of  the  snows, 
and  April  lapping  well  down  upon  the  greening  fields 
and  unloosened  currents,  not  beyond  the  limits  of  win- 
ter's sallying  storms,  but  well  within  the  vernal  zone, 
—  within  the  reach  of  the  warm  breath  and  subtle, 
quickening  influences  of  the  plain  below.  At  its  best, 
April  is  the  tenderest  of  tender  salads  made  crisp  by 
ice  or  snow  water.  Its  type  is  the  first  spear  of  grass. 
The  senses  —  sight,  hearing,  smell  —  are  as  hungry 
for  its  delicate  and  almost  spiritual  tokens,  as  the  cat- 
tle are  for  the  first  bite  of  its  fields.  How  it  touches 
one  and  makes  him  both  glad  and  sad  !  The  voices  of 
the  arriving  birds,  the  migrating  fowls,  the  clouds  of 
pigeons  sweeping  across  the  sky  or  filling  the  woods, 
the  elfin  horn  of  the  first  honey-bee  venturing  abroad 
in  the  middle  of  the  day,  the  clear  piping  of  the  little 
frogs  in  the  marshes  at  sundown,  the  camp-fire  in  the 
sugar-bush,  the  smoke  seen  afar  rising  over  the  trees, 


110  APRIL. 

the  tinge  of  green  that  comes  so  suddenly  on  the 
sunny  knolls  and  slopes,  the  full  translucent  streams, 
the  waxing  and  warming  sun,  — how  these  things  and 
others  like  them  are  noted  by  the  eager  eye  and  ear  ! 
April  is  my  natal  month,  and  I  am  born  again  into 
new  delight  and  new  surprises  at  each  return  of  it. 
Its  name  has  an  indescribable  charm  to  me.  Its  two 
syllables  are  like  the  calls  of  the  first  birds  —  like 
that  of  the  phoebe-bird,  or  of  the  meadow-lark.  Its 
very  snows  are  fertilizing,  and  are  called  the  poor 
man's  manure. 

Then  its  odors  !  I  am  thrilled  by  its  fresh  and 
indescribable  odors  —  the  perfume  of  the  bursting 
sod,  of  the  quickened  roots  and  rootlets,  of  the  mould 
under  the  leaves,  of  the  fresh  furrows.  No  other 
month  has  odors  like  it.  The  west  wind  the  other 
day  came  fraught  with  a  perfume  that  was  to  the  sense 
of  smell  what  a  wild  and  delicate  strain  of  music  is  to 
the  ear.  It  was  almost  transcendental.  I  walked 
across  the  hill  with  my  nose  in  the  air  taking  it  in. 
It  lasted  for  two  days.  I  imagined  it  came  from  the 
willows  of  a  distant  swamp,  whose  catkins  were  af- 
fording the  bees  their  first  pollen,  —  or  did  it  come 
from  much  farther  —  from  beyond  the  horizon,  the  ac- 
cumulated breath  of  innumerable  farms  and  budding 
forests  ?  The  main  characteristic  of  these  April  odors 
is  their  uncloying  freshness.  They  are  not  sweet,  they 
are  oftener  bitter,  they  are  penetrating  and  lyrical.  I 
know  well  the  odors  of  May  and  June,  of  the  world 
of  meadows  and  orchards  bursting  into  bloom,  but 


APRIL.  Ill 

they  are  not  so  ineffable  and  immaterial  and  so  stim- 
ulating to  the  sense  as  the  incense  of  April. 

The  season  of  which  I  speak  does  not  correspond 
with  the  April  of  the  almanac  in  all  sections  of  our 
vast  geography.  It  answers  to  March  in  Virginia  and 
Maryland,  while  in  parts  of  New  York  and  New 
England  it  laps  well  over  into  May.  It  begins  when 
the  partridge  drums,  when  the  hylas  pipes,  when  the 
shad  start  up  the  rivers,  when  the  grass  greens  in  the 
spring  runs,  and  it  ends  when  the  leaves  are  unfold- 
ing and  the  last  snow-flake  dissolves  in  mid-air.  It  is 
the  first  of  May  when  the  first  swallow  appears,  when 
the  whip-poor-will  is  heard,  when  the  wood-thrush 
sings,  but  it  is  April  as  long  as  there  is  snow  upon 
the  mountains,  no  matter  what  the  almanac  may  say. 
Our  April  is,  in  fact,  a  kind  of  Alpine  summer,  full 
of  such  contrasts  and  touches  of  wild,  delicate  beauty 
as  no  other  season  affords.  The  deluded  citizen 
fancies  there  is  nothing  enjoyable  in  the  country  till 
June,  and  so  misses  the  freshest,  tenderest  part.  It 
is  as  if  one  should  miss  strawberries  and  begin  his 
fruit  eating  with  melons  and  peaches.  These  last  are 
good  —  supremely  so,  they  are  melting  and  luscious, 
but  nothing  so  thrills  and  penetrates  the  taste  and 
wakes  up  and  teases  the  papillae  of  the  tongue  as  the 
uncloying  strawberry.  What  midsummer  sweetness 
half  so  distracting  as  its  brisk  sub-acid  flavor,  and 
what  splendor  of  full-leaved  June  can  stir  the  blood 
like  the  best  of  leafless  April  ? 

One  characteristic  April  feature,  and  one  that  de- 


112  APRIL. 

lights  me  very  much,  is  the  perfect  emerald  of  the 
spring  runs  while  the  fields  are  yet  brown  and  sere, 
—  strips  and  patches  of  the  most  vivid  velvet  green 
on  the  slopes  and  in  the  valleys.  How  the  eye  grazes 
there  and  is  filled  and  refreshed !  I  had  forgotten 
what  a  marked  feature  this  was  until  I  recently  rode 
in  an  open  wagon  for  three  days  through  a  mountain- 
ous, pastoral  country,  remarkable  for  its  fine  springs. 
Those  delicious  green  patches  are  yet  in  my  eye. 
The  fountains  flowed  with  May.  Where  no  springs 
occurred,  there  were  hints  and  suggestions  of  springs 
about  the  fields  and  by  the  road-side  in  the  freshened 
grass  —  sometimes  overflowing  a  space  in  the  form 
of  an  actual  fountain.  The  water  did  not  quite  get  to 
the  surface  in  such  places,  but  sent  its  influence. 

The  fields  of  wheat  and  rye,  too,  how  they  stand 
out  of  the  April  landscape  —  great  green  squares  on 
a  field  of  brown  or  gray  ! 

Among  April  sounds  there  is  none  more  welcome 
or  suggestive  to  me  than  the  voice  of  the  little  frogs 
piping  in  the  marshes.  No  bird-note  can  surpass  it 
as  a  spring  token ;  and  as  it  is  not  mentioned,  to  my 
knowledge,  by  the  poets  and  writers  of  other  lands,  I 
am  ready  to  believe  it  is  characteristic  of  our  season 
alone.  You  may  be  sure  April  has  really  come  when 
this  little  amphibian  creeps  out  of  the  mud  and  in- 
flates its  throat.  We  talk  of  the  bird  inflating  its 
throat,  but  you  should  see  this  tiny  minstrel  inflate 
its  throat,  which  becomes  like  a  large  bubble  and 
suggests  a  drummer  boy  with  his  drum  slung  very 


APKIL.  113 

high.  In  this  drum,  or  by  the  aid  of  it,  the  sound  is 
produced.  Generally  the  note  is  very  feeble  at  first, 
as  if  the  frost  was  not  yet  all  out  of  the  creature's 
throat,  and  only  one  voice  will  be  heard,  some  prophet 
bolder  than  all  the  rest,  or  upon  whom  the  quicken- 
ing ray  of  spring  has  first  fallen.  And  it  often  hap- 
pens that  he  is  stoned  for  his  pains  by  the  yet  un- 
pacified  element,  and  is  compelled  literally  to  "  shut 
up  "  beneath  a  fall  of  snow  or  a  heavy  frost.  Soon, 
however,  he  lifts  up  his  voice  again  with  more  confi- 
dence, and  is  joined  by  others  and  still  others,  till  in 
due  time,  say  toward  the  last  of  the  month,  there  is 
a  shrill  musical  uproar,  as  the  sun  is  setting,  in  every 
marsh  and  bog  in  the  land.  It  is  a  plaintive  sound, 
and  I  have  heard  people  from  the  city  speak  of  it  as 
lonesome  and  depressing,  but  to  the  lover  of  the  coun- 
try it  is  a  pure  spring  melody.  The  little  piper  will 
sometimes  climb  a  bullrush,  to  which  he  clings  like  a 
sailor  to  a  mast,  and  send  forth  his  shrill  call.  There 
is  a  southern  species  heard  when  you  have  reached 
the  Potomac  whose  note  is  far  more  harsh  and  crack- 
ling. To  stand  on  the  verge  of  a  swamp  vocal  with 
these,  pains  and  stuns  the  ear.  The  call  of  the 
northern  species  is  far  more  tender  and  musical. 
There  is  yet  in  my  mind  some  uncertainty  about  the 
truth  of  the  opinion  held  by  naturalists,  that  these 
little  frogs  presently  take  to  the  trees  and  become  the 
well-known  "tree-toads"  whose  call  so  frequently 
announce  rain. 

Then  is  there  anything  like  a  perfect  April  morn- 
8 


114  APEIL. 

ing  ?  One  hardly  knows  what  the  sentiment  of  it  is, 
but  it  is  something  very  delicious.  It  is  youth  and 
hope.  It  is  a  new  earth  and  a  new  sky.  How  the  air 
transmits  sounds,  and  what  an  awakening,  prophetic 
character  all  sounds  have  !  The  distant  barking  of  a 
dog  or  the  lowing  of  a  cow,  or  the  crowing  of  a  cock 
seems  from  out  the  heart  of  Nature,  and  to  be  a  call 
to  come  forth.  The  great  sun  appears  to  have  been 
reburnished,  and  there  is  something  in  his  first  glance 
above  the  eastern  hills  and  the  way  his  eye-beams  dart 
right  and  left  and  smite  the  rugged  mountains  into 
gold,  that  quickens  the  pulse  and  inspires  the  heart. 

Across  the  fields  in  the  early  morning  I  hear  some 
of  the  rare  April  birds  —  the  cheewink  and  the  brown 
thrasher.  The  robin,  bluebird,  song-sparrow,  phcebe- 
bird,  etc.,  come  in  March ;  but  these  two  ground  birds 
are  seldom  heard  till  toward  the  last  of  April.  The 
ground  birds  are  all  tree-singers  or  air-singers ;  they 
must  have  an  elevated  stage  to  speak  from.  Our 
long-tailed  thrush,  or  thrasher,  like  its  congeners,  the 
cat-bird  and  mocking-bird,  delights  in  a  high  branch 
of  some  solitary  tree  whence  it  will  pour  out  its  rich 
and  intricate  warble  for  an  hour  together.  This  bird 
is  the  great  American  chipper.  There  is  no  other 
bird  that  I  know  of  that  can  chip  with  such  emphasis 
and  military  decision  as  this  yellow-eyed  songster. 
It  is  like  the  click  of  a  giant  gun-lock.  Why  is  the 
thrasher  so  stealthy  ?  It  always  seems  to  be  going 
about  on  tiptoe.  I  never  knew  it  to  steal  anything, 
and  yet  it  skulks  and  hides  like  a  fugitive  from  justice. 


APRIL.  115 

One  never  sees  it  flying  aloft  in  the  air  and  traversing 
the  world  openly,  like  most  birds,  but  it  darts  along 
fences  and  through  bushes  as  if  pursued  by  a  guilty 
conscience.  Only  when  the  musical  fit  is  upon  it  does 
it  come  up  into  full  view,  and  invite  the  world  to  hear 
and  behold. 

The  cheewink  is  a  shy  bird  also,  but  not  stealthy. 
It  is  very  inquisitive,  and  sets  up  a  great  scratching 
among  the  leaves,  apparently  to  attract  your  attention. 
The  male  is  perhaps  the  most  conspicuously  marked 
of  all  the  ground  birds  except  the  bobolink,  being 
black  above,  bay  on  the  sides,  and  white  beneath. 
The  bay  is  in  complement  to  the  leaves  he  is  forever 
scratching  among,  —  they  have  rustled  against  his 
breast  and  sides  so  long  that  these  parts  have  taken 
their  color ;  but  whence  come  the  white  and  black  ? 
The  bird  seems  to  be  aware  that  his  color  betrays 
him,  for  there  are  few  birds  in  the  woods  so  careful 
about  keeping  themselves  screened  from  view.  When 
in  song,  its  favorite  perch  is  the  top  of  some  high  bush 
near  to  cover.  On  being  disturbed  at  such  times  it 
pitches  down  into  the  brush  and  is  instantly  lost  to 
view. 

This  is  the  bird  that  Thomas  Jefferson  wrote  to 
Wilson  about,  greatly  exciting  the  latter's  curiosity. 
Wilson  was  just  then  upon  the  threshold  of  his  career 
as  an  ornithologist,  and  had  made  a  drawing  of  the 
Canada  jay  which  he  sent  to  the  President.  It  was 
a  new  bird,  and,  in  reply,  Jefferson  called  his  attention 
to  a  "  curious  bird"  which  was  everywhere  to  be  heard, 


116  APRIL. 

but  scarcely  ever  to  be  seen.  He  had  for  twenty  years 
interested  the  young  sportsmen  of  his  neighborhood  to 
shoot  one  for  him,  but  without  success.  "  It  is  in  all 
the  forests,  from  spring  to  fall ;  "  he  says,  in  his  letter, 
"  and  never  but  on  the  tops  of  the  tallest  trees,  from 
which  it  perpetually  serenades  us  with  some  of  the 
sweetest  notes,  and  as  clear  as  those  of  the  nightin- 
gale. I  have  followed  it  for  miles,  without  ever  but 
once  getting  a  good  view  of  it.  It  is  of  the  size  and 
make  of  the  mocking-bird,  lightly  thrush-colored  on 
the  back,  and  a  grayish  white  on  the  breast  and  belly. 
Mr.  Randolph,  my  son-in-law,  was  in  possession  of 
one  which  had  been  shot  by  a  neighbor,"  etc.  Ran- 
dolph pronounced  it  a  fly-catcher,  which  was  a  good 
way  wide  of  the  mark.  Jefferson  must  have  seen 
only  the  female,  after  all  his  tramp,  from  his  descrip- 
tion of  the  color,  but  he  was  doubtless  following  his 
own  great  thoughts  more  than  the  bird,  else  he  would 
have  had  an  earlier  view.  The  bird  was  not  a  new 
one,  but  was  well-known  then  as  the  ground-robin. 
The  President  put  Wilson  on  the  wrong  scent  by  his 
erroneous  description,  and  it  was  a  long  time  before 
the  latter  got  at  the  truth  of  the  case.  But  Jefferson's 
letter  is  a  good  sample  of  those  which  specialists  often 
receive  from  intelligent  persons  who  have  seen  or 
heard  something  in  their  line,  very  curious,  or  entirely 
new,  and  who  set  the  man  of  science  agog  by  a  de- 
scription of  the  supposed  novelty,  —  a  description  that 
generally  fits  the  facts  of  the  case  about  as  well  as 
your  coat  fits  the  chair-back.     Strange  and  curious 


APRIL.  117 

things  in  the  air,  and  in  the  water,  and  in  the  earth 
beneath,  are  seen  every  day  except  by  those  who  are 
looking  for  them,  namely,  the  naturalists.  "When  Wil- 
son or  Audubon  gets  his  eye  on  the  unknown  bird, 
the  illusion  vanishes,  and  your  phenomenon  turns  out 
to  be  one  of  the  commonplaces  of  the  fields  or  woods. 
A  prominent  April  bird  that  one  does  not  have  to 
go  to  the  woods  or  away  from  his  own  door  to  see 
and  hear,  is  the  hardy  and  ever-welcome  meadow-lark. 
What  a  twang  there  is  about  this  bird,  and  what 
vigor  !  It  smacks  of  the  soil.  It  is  the  winged  em- 
bodiment of  the  spirit  of  our  spring  meadows.  What 
emphasis  in  its  "  z-d-t,  z-d-t"  and  what  character  in  its 
long,  piercing  note.  Its  straight,  tapering,  sharp  beak 
is  typical  of  its  voice.  Its  note  goes  like  a  shaft  from 
a  cross-bow;  it  is  a  little  too  sharp  and  piercing 
when  near  at  hand,  but  heard  in  the  proper  perspec- 
tive, it  is  eminently  melodious  and  pleasing.  It  is  one 
of  the  major  notes  of  the  fields  at  this  season.  In 
fact,  it  easily  dominates  all  others.  "  Spring  o'  the 
year !  spring  o'  the  year  /"  it  says,  with  a  long-drawn 
breath,  a  little  plaintive,  but  not  complaining,  or  mel- 
ancholy. At  times  it  indulges  in  something  much 
more  intricate  and  lark-like  while  hovering  on  the 
wing  in  mid-air,  but  a  song  is  beyond  the  compass  of 
its  instrument,  and  the  attempt  usually  ends  in  a  break- 
down. A  clear,  sweet,  strong,  high-keyed  note,  ut- 
tered from  some  knoll,  or  rock,  or  stake  in  the  fence, 
is  its  proper  vocal  performance.  It  has  the  build, 
and  walk,  and  flight  of  the  quail  and  the  grouse.     It 


118  APRIL. 

gets  up  before  you  in  much  the  same  manner  and 
falls  an  easy  prey  to  the  crack  shot.  Its  yellow 
breast,  surmounted  by  a  black  crescent,  it  need  not  be 
ashamed  to  turn  to  the  morning  sun,  while  its  coat 
of  mottled  gray  is  in  perfect  keeping  with  the  stub- 
ble amid  which  it  walks. 

The  two  lateral  white  quills  in  its  tail  seem  strictly 
in  character.  These  quills  spring  from  a  dash  of 
scorn  and  defiance  in  the  bird's  make-up.  By  the 
aid  of  these,  it  can  almost  emit  a  flash  as  it  struts 
about  the  fields  and  jerks  out  its  sharp  notes.  They 
give  a  rayed,  a  definite  and  piquant  expression  to  its 
movements.  This  bird  is  not  properly  a  lark,  but  a 
starling,  say  the  ornithologists,  though  it  is  lark-like 
in  its  habits,  being  a  walker  and  entirely  a  ground 
bird.  Its  color  also  allies  it  to  the  true  lark.  I  be- 
lieve there  is  no  bird  in  the  English  or  European 
fields  that  answers  to  this  hardy  pedestrian  of  our 
meadows.  He  is  a  true  American,  and  his  note  one 
of  our  characteristic  April  sounds. 

Another  marked  April  note,  proceeding  sometimes 
from  the  meadows,  but  more  frequently  from  the 
rough  pastures  and  borders  of  the  woods,  is  the  call  of 
the  high-hole,  or  golden-shafted  wood-pecker.  It  is 
quite  as  strong  as  that  of  the  meadow-lark,  but  not 
so  long-drawn  and  piercing.  It  is  a  succession  of 
short  notes  rapidly  uttered,  as  if  the  bird  said,  "  if-if- 
tf-tf-\f-if~tf"  The  note  of  the  ordinary  downy,  or 
hairy  woodpecker,  suggests,  in  some  way,  the  sound 
of  a  steel  punch ;  but  that  of  the  high-hole  is  much 


APRIL.  119 

softer,  and  strikes  on  the  ear  with  real  spring-time 
melody.  The  high-hole  is  not  so  much  a  wood- 
pecker as  he  is  a  ground-pecker.  He  subsists  largely 
on  ants  and  crickets,  and  does  not  appear  till  they 
are  to  be  found. 

In  Solomon's  description  of  spring,  the  voice  of 
the  turtle  is  prominent,  but  our  turtle,  or  mourning 
dove,  though  it  arrives  in  April,  can  hardly  be  said 
to  contribute  noticeably  to  the  open-air  sounds.  Its 
call  is  so  vague,  and  soft,  and  mournful,  — in  fact,  so 
remote  and  diffused,  that  few  persons  ever  hear  it  at 
all. 

Such  songsters  as  the  crow  blackbird  are  noticeable 
at  this  season,  though  they  take  a  back  seat  a  little 
later.  It  utters  a  peculiarly  liquid  April  sound.  In- 
deed, one  would  think  its  crop  was  full  of  water,  its 
notes  so  bubble  up  and  regurgitate,  and  are  delivered 
with  such  an  apparent  stomachic  contraction.  This 
bird  is  the  only  feathered  polygamist  we  have.  The 
females  are  greatly  in  excess  of  the  males,  and  the 
latter  are  usually  attended  by  three  or  four  of  the 
former.  As  soon  as  the  other  birds  begin  to  build, 
they  are  on  the  qui  vive,  prowling  about  like  gyp- 
sies, not  to  steal  the  young  of  others,  but  to  steal  their 
eggs  into  other  birds'  nests,  and  so  shirk  the  labor 
and  responsibility  of  hatching  and  rearing  their  own 
young.  As  these  birds  do  not  mate,  and  as  there- 
fore there  can  be  little  or  no  rivalry  or  competition 
between  the  males,  one  wonders  —  in  view  of  Dar- 
win's teaching  —  why  one  sex  should  have  brighter 


120  APRIL. 

and  richer  plumage  than  the  other,  which  is  the  fact 
The  males  are  easily  distinguished  from  the  dull 
and  faded  females  by  their  deep,  glossy,  black  coats. 

The  April  of  English  literature  corresponds  nearly 
to  our  May.  In  Great  Britain,  the  swallow  and  the 
cuckoo  arrive  in  April ;  with  us.  their  appearance  is 
several  weeks  later.  Our  April,  at  its  best,  is  a  bright, 
laughing  nice  under  a  hood  of  snow  like  the  English 
March,  but  presenting  sharper  contrasts,  a  greater 
mixture  of  smiles  and  tears  and  icy  looks  than  are 
known  to  our  ancestral  climate.  Indeed,  winter  some- 
times retraces  his  steps  in  this  month,  and  unburdens 
himself  of  the  snows  that  the  previous  cold  has  kept 
back ;  but  we  are  always  sure  of  a  number  of  radiant, 
equable  days — days  that  go  before  the  bud.  when  the 
sun  embraces  the  earth  with  fervor  and  determination. 
How  his  beams  pour  into  the  woods  till  the  mould 
under  the  leaves  is  warm  and  emits  an  odor !  The 
waters  glint  and  sparkle,  the  birds  gather  in  groups, 
and  even  those  unwont  to  sing  find  a  voice.  On  the 
streets  of  the  cities,  what  a  flutter,  what  bright  looks 
and  gay  colors  !  I  recall  one  preeminent  day  of  this 
kind  last  April.  I  made  a  note  of  it  in  my  note-book. 
The  earth  seemed  suddenly  to  emerge  from  a  wilder- 
ness of  clouds  and  chilliness  into  one  of  these  blue 
sunlit  spaces.  How  the  voyagers  rejoiced  !  Invalids 
came  forth,  old  men  sauntered  down  the  street,  stocks 
went  up,  and  the  political  outlook  brightened. 

Such  days  bring  out  the  last  of  the  hibernating  ani- 
mals.   The  woodchuck  unrolls  and  creeps  out  of  his 


APRIL.  121 

den  to  see  if  his  clover  has  started  yet  The  torpidity 
leaves  the  snakes  and  the  turtles,  and  they  come  forth 
and  bask  in  the  sun.  There  is  nothing  so  small, 
nothing  so  great,  that  it  does  not  respond  to  these 
celestial  spring  days,  and  give  the  pendulum  of  life  a 
fresh  start. 

April  is  also  the  month  of  the  new  furrow.  As 
soon  as  the  frost  is  gone  and  the  ground  settled,  the 
plow  is  started  upon  the  hill,  and  at  each  bout  I  see 
its  brightened  mould-board  flash  in  the  sun.  Where 
the  last  remnants  of  the  snow-drift  lingered  yesterday 
the  plow  breaks  the  sod  to-day.  Where  the  drift  was 
deepest  the  grass  is  pressed  flat,  and  there  is  a  deposit 
of  sand  and  earth  blown  from  the  fields  to  windward. 
Line  upon  line  the  turf  is  reversed,  until  there  stands 
out  of  the  neutral  landscape  a  ruddy  square  visible 
for  miles,  or  until  the  breasts  of  the  broad  hills  glow 
like  the  breasts  of  the  robins. 

Then  who  would  not  have  a  garden  in  April  ?  to 
rake  together  the  rubbish  and  burn  it  up,  to  turn  over 
the  renewed  soil,  to  scatter  the  rich  compost,  to  plant 
the  first  seed,  or  bury  the  first  tuber !  It  is  not  the 
seed  that  is  planted,  any  more  than  it  is  I  that  is 
planted ;  it  is  not  the  dry  stalks  and  weeds  that  are 
burned  up,  any  more  than  it  is  my  gloom  and  regrets 
that  are  consumed.  An  April  smoke  makes  a  clean 
harvest. 

I  think  April  is  the  best  month  to  be  born  in.  One 
is  just  in  time,  so  to  speak,  to  catch  the  first  train 
which  is  made  up  in  this  month.     My  April  chickens 


122  APRIL. 

always  turn  out  best.  They  get  an  early  start ;  they 
have  rugged  constitutions.  Late  chickens  cannot 
stand  the  heavy  dews,  or  withstand  the  predaceous 
hawks.  In  April  all  nature  starts  with  you.  You 
have  not  come  out  your  hibernaculum  too  early  or 
too  late ;  the  time  is  ripe,  and  if  you  do  not  keep 
pace  with  the  rest,  why,  the  fault  is  not  in  the  season. 


SPRING  POEMS. 


SPRING  POEMS. 

There  is  no  month  oftener  on  the  tongues  of  the 

poets  than  April.    It  is  the  initiative  month ;  it  opens 

the  door  of  the  seasons ;  the  interest  and  expectations 

of  the  untried,  the  untasted,  lurk  in  it. 

"  From  you  have  I  been  absent  in  the  spring," 

says  Shakespeare  in  one  of  his  sonnets, 

11  When  proud-pied  April,  dressed  in  all  his  trim, 
Hath  put  a  spirit  of  youth  in  every  thing, 
That  heavy  Saturn  laughed  and  leaped  with  him." 

The  following  poem  from  Tennyson's  "In  Memo- 
riam,"  might  be  headed  "  April,"  and  serve  as  descrip- 
tive of  parts  of  our  season  :  — 

11  Now  fades  the  last  long  streak  of  snow, 
Now  bourgeons  every  maze  of  quick 
About  the  flowering  squares,  and  thick 
By  ashen  roots  the  violets  blow. 

"  Now  rings  the  woodland  loud  and  long, 
The  distance  takes  a  lovelier  hue, 
And  drowned  in  yonder  living  blue 
The  lark  becomes  a  sightless  song. 

"  Now  dance  the  lights  on  lawn  and  lea, 
The  flocks  are  whiter  down  the  vale, 
And  milkier  every  milky  sail 
On  winding  stream  or  distant  sea ; 


126  SPRING   POEMS. 

"  "Where  now  the  sea-mew  pipes,  or  dives 
In  yonder  greening  gleam,  and  fly 
The  happy  birds,  that  change  their  sky 
To  build  and  brood ;  that  live  their  lives 

"  From  land  to  land;  and  in  my  breast 
Spring  wakens  too ;  and  my  regret 
Becomes  an  April  violet, 
And  buds  and  blossoms  like  the  rest." 

In  the  same  poem  the  poet  asks :  — 

"  Can  trouble  live  with  April  days?  " 

Yet  they  are  not  all  jubilant  chords  that  this  season 
awakens.  Occasionally  there  is  an  undertone  of 
vague  longing  and  sadness,  akiu  to  that  which  one 
experiences  in  autumn.  Hope  for  a  moment  assumes 
the  attitude  of  memory  and  stands  with  reverted  look. 
The  haze  that  in  spring  as  well  as  in  fall  sometimes 
descends  and  envelops  all  things,  has  in  it  in  some  way 
the  sentiment  of  music,  of  melody,  and  awakens 
pensive  thoughts.  Elizabeth  Akers,  in  her  "  April," 
has  recognized  and  fully  expressed  this  feeling.  I  give 
the  first  and  last  stanzas :  — 

"  The  strange,  sweet  days  are  here  again 
The  happy-mournf ul  days ; 
The  songs  which  trembled  on  our  lips 
Are  half  complaint,  half  praise. 

"  Swing,  robin,  on  the  budded  sprays, 
And  sing  your  blithest  tune ;  — 
Help  us  across  these  homesick  days 
Into  the  joy  of  June!  " 

This  poet  has  also  given  a  touch  of  spring  in  her 


SPRING  POEMS.  127 

"  March,"  which,  however,  should  be  written  "  April " 
in  the  New  England  climate. 

"  The  brown  buds  thicken  on  the  trees, 
Unbound,  the  free  streams  sing, 
As  March  leads  forth  across  the  leas 
The  wild  and  windy  spring. 

u  Where  in  the  fields  the  melted  snow 
Leaves  hollows  warm  and  wet, 
Ere  many  days  will  sweetly  blow 
The  first  blue  violet." 

But  on  the  whole  the  poets  have  not  been  emi- 
nently successful  in  depicting  spring.  The  humid 
season  with  its  tender  melting  blue  sky,  its  fresh 
earthly  smells,  its  new  furrow,  its  few  simple  signs 
and  awakenings  here  and  there,  and  its  strange  feel- 
ing of  unrest,  —  how  difficult  to  put  its  charms  into 
words?  None  of  the  so-called  pastoral  poets  have 
succeeded  in  doing  it.  That  is  the  best  part  of  spring 
which  escapes  a  direct  and  matter-of-fact  description 
of  her.  There  is  more  of  spring  in  a  line  or  two  of 
Chaucer  and  Spenser  than  in  the  elaborate  portraits 
of  her  by  Thomson  or  Pope,  because  the  former 
had  spring  in  their  hearts,  and  the  latter  only  in  their 
ink  hours.  Nearly  all  Shakespeare's  songs  are  spring- 
songs  —  full  of  the  banter,  the  frolic,  and  the  love- 
making  of  the  early  season.  What  an  unloosed  cur- 
rent, too,  of  joy  and  fresh  new  life  and  appetite  in 
Burns. 

In  spring  everything  has  such  a  margin ;  there  are 
such  spaces  of  silence.     The  influences  are  at  work 


128  SPRING   POEMS. 

underground.  Our  delight  is  in  a  few  things.  The 
drying  road  is  enough ;  a  single  wild-flower,  the  note 
of  the  first  bird,  the  partridge  drumming  in  the  April 
woods,  the  restless  herds,  the  sheep  steering  for  the 
uplands,  the  cow  lowing  in  the  highway  or  hiding  her 
calf  in  the  bushes,  the  first  fires,  the  smoke  going  up 
through  the  shining  atmosphere,  from  the  burning  of 
rubbish  in  gardens  and  old  fields,  etc.,  each  of  these 
simple  things  fills  the  breast  with  yearning  and  delight, 
for  they  are  tokens  of  the  spring.  The  best  spring- 
poems  have  this  singleness  and  sparseness.  Listen  to 
Solomon  :  "  For  lo,  the  winter  is  past,  the  rain  is  over 
and  gone ;  the  flowers  appear  on  the  earth ;  the  time 
of  the  singing  of  birds  is  come,  and  the  voice  of  the 
turtle  is  heard  in  our  land."  In  Wordsworth  are 
some  things  that  breathe  the  air  of  spring.  These 
lines,  written  in  early  spring,  afford  a  good  specimen  : 

"  I  heard  a  thousand  blended  notes, 
While  in  a  grove  I  sat  reclined, 
In  that  sweet  mood,  when  pleasant  thoughts 
Bring  sad  thoughts  to  the  mind." 

"  To  her  fair  works  did  nature  link 

The  human  soul  that  through  me  ran  ; 
And  much  it  grieved  my  heart  to  think 
What  man  has  made  of  man. 

"  Through  primrose  tufts,  in  that  sweet  bower, 
The  periwinkle  trailed  its  wreaths  ; 
And  't  is  my  faith  that  every  flower 
Enjoys  the  air  it  breathes. 

"  The  birds  around  me  hopped  and  played ; 
Their  thoughts  I  cannot  measure ;  — 


SPRING  POEMS.  129 

But  the  least  motion  which  they  made, 
It  seemed  a  thrill  of  pleasure." 

Or  these,  from  another  poem  written  in  his   usual 

study,  Out-of-Doors,  and  addressed  to  his  sister:  — 

"  It  is  the  first  mild  day  of  March, 
Each  minute  sweeter  than  before; 
The  redbreast  sings  from  the  tall  larch 
That  stands  beside  the  door. 

11  There  is  a  blessing  in  the  air, 

Which  seems  a  sense  of  joy  to  yield 
To  the  bare  trees,  and  mountains  bare, 

And  grass  in  the  green  field. 
•  ...  • 

"  Love,  now  an  universal  birth, 
From  heart  to  heart  is  stealing, 
From  earth  to  man,  from  man  to  earth; 
It  is  the  hour  of  feeling. 

"  One  moment  now  may  give  us  more 
Than  fifty  years  of  reason ; 
Our  minds  shall  drink  at  every  pore 
The  spirit  of  the  season." 

It  is  the  simplicity  of  such  lines,  like  the  naked 
branches  of  the  trees  or  the  unclothed  fields,  and  the 
spring-like  depth  of  feeling  and  suggestion  they  hold, 
that  make  them  so  appropriate  to  this  season. 

At  this  season  I  often  find  myself  repeating  these 
lines  of  his  also :  — 

"  My  heart  leaps  up,  when  I  behold 
A  rainbow  in  the  sky ; 
So  was  it,  when  my  life  began  ; 
So  is  it,  now  I  am  a  man ; 

So  be  it,  when  I  shall  grow  old  ; 
Or  let  me  die !  " 


130  SPRING  POEMS. 

Though  there  are  so  few  good  poems  especially  com- 
memorative of  the  spring,  there  have,  no  doubt,  been 
spring-poets  —  poets  with  such  newness  and  fullness 
of  life  and  such  quickening  power,  that  the  world  is 
re-created,  as  it  were,  beneath  their  touch.  Of  course 
this  is  in  a  measure  so  with  all  real  poets.  But  the 
difference  I  would  indicate  may  exist  between  poets 
of  the  same  or  nearly  the  same  magnitude.  Thus, 
in  this  light  Tennyson  is  an  autumnal  poet,  mellow 
and  dead-ripe,  and  was  so  from  the  first,  while  Words- 
worth has  much  more  of  the  spring  in  him,  is  nearer 
the  bone  of  things  and  to  primitive  conditions. 

Among  the  old  poems,  one  which  seems  to  me  to 
have  much  of  the  charm  of  spring-time  upon  it  is  the 
story  of  Cupid  and  Psyche  in  Apuleius.  The  songs, 
gambols,  and  wooings  of  the  early  birds  are  not  more 
welcome  and  suggestive.  How  graceful  and  airy,  and 
yet  what  a  tender,  profound,  human  significance  it 
contains  !  But  the  great  vernal  poem,  doubly  so  in 
that  it  is  the  expression  of  the  spring-time  of  the  race, 
the  boyhood  of  man  as  well,  is  the  Iliad  of  Homer. 
What  faith,  what  simple  wonder,  what  unconscious 
strength,  what  beautiful  savagery,  what  magnanimous 
enmity  —  a  very  paradise  of  war ! 

Though  so  young  a  people,  there  is  not  much  of 
the  feeling  of  spring  in  any  of  our  books.  The  muse 
of  our  poets  is  wise  rather  than  joyous.  There  is  no 
excess  or  extravagance  or  unruliness  in  her.  There 
are  spring  sounds  and  tokens  in  Emerson's  "May 
Day:"  — 


SPRING   POEMS.  131 

M  April  cold  with  dropping  rain 
Willows  and  lilacs  brings  again, 
The  whistle  of  returning  birds, 
And  trumpet-lowing  of  the  herds. 
The  scarlet  maple-keys  betray 
What  potent  blood  hath  modest  May  ; 
What  fiery  force  the  earth  renews, 
The  wealth  of  forms,  the  flush  of  hues ; 
Joy  shed  in  rosy  waves  abroad 
Flows  from  the  heart  of  Love,  the  Lord." 

But  this  is  not  spring  in  the  blood.  Among  the 
works  of  our  young  and  rising  poets,  I  am  not  cer- 
tain but  Mr.  Gilder's  "  New  Day "  is  entitled  to  rank 
as  a  spring  poem  in  the  sense  in  which  I  am  speaking. 
It  is  full  of  gayety  and  daring,  and  full  of  the  reck- 
less abandon  of  the  male  bird  when  he  is  winning  his 
mate.  It  is  full  also  of  the  tantalizing  suggestive- 
ness  —  the  half  lights  and  shades  of  April  and  May. 
Of  prose-poets  who  have  the  charm  of  the  spring- 
time upon  them,  the  best  recent  example  I  know  of 
is  Bjbrnson,  the  Norwegian  romancist.  What  espe- 
cially makes  his  books  spring-like  is  their  freshness 
and  sweet  good  faith.  There  is  also  a  reticence  and 
an  unwrought  suggestiveness  about  them  that  is  like 
the  promise  of  birds  and  early  flowers.  Of  Turge- 
neiff,  the  Russian,  much  the  same  thing  might  be  said. 
His  stories  are  simple  and  elementary,  and  have  none 
of  the  elaborate  hair-splitting  and  forced  hot-house 
character  of  the  current  English  or  American  novel. 
They  spring  from  stronger,  more  healthful  and  manly 
conditions,  and  have  a  force  in  them  that  is  like  a 
rising,  incoming  tide. 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

I  wonder  that  Wilson  Flagg  did  not  include  the 
cow  among  his  "  Picturesque  Animals,"  for  that  is 
where  she  belongs.  She  has  not  the  classic  beauty  of 
the  horse,  but  in  picture-making  qualities  she  is  far 
ahead  of  him.  Her  shaggy,  loose-jointed  body,  her 
irregular,  sketchy  outlines,  like  those  of  the  landscape 

—  the  hollows  and  ridges,  the  slopes  and  prominences 

—  her  tossing  horns,  her  bushy  tail,  her  swinging  gait, 
her  tranquil,  ruminating  habits  —  all  tend  to  make 
her  an  object  upon  which  the  artist  eye  loves  to  dwell. 
The  artists  are  forever  putting  her  into  pictures  too. 
In  rural  landscape  scenes  she  is  an  important  feature. 
Behold  her  grazing  in  the  pastures  and  on  the  hill- 
sides, or  along  banks  of  streams,  or  ruminating  under 
wide-spreading  trees,  or  standing  belly  deep  in  the 
creek  or  pond,  or  lying  upon  the  smooth  places  in  the 
quiet  summer  afternoon,  the  day's  grazing  done,  and 
waiting  to  be  summoned  home  to  be  milked  ;  and 
again  in  the  twilight  lying  upon  the  level  summit  of 
the  hill,  or  where  the  sward  is  thickest  and  softest ; 
or  in  winter  a  herd  of  them  filing  along  toward 
the  spring  to  drink,  or  being  "  foddered  "  from  the 


136  OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

stack  in  the  field  upon  the  new  snow  —  surely  the  cow 
is  a  picturesque  animal,  and  all  her  goings  and  com- 
ings are  pleasant  to  behold. 

I  looked  into  Hamerton's  clever  book  on  the  do- 
mestic animals,  also  expecting  to  find  my  divinity  duly 
celebrated,  but  he  passes  her  by  and  contemplates 
the  bovine  qualities  only  as  they  appear  in  the  ox 
and  the  bull. 

Neither  have  the  poets  made  much  of  the  cow,  but 

have  rather  dwelt  upon  the  steer,  or  the  ox  yoked  to 

the  plow.     I  recall  this  touch  from  Emerson  :  — 

"  The  heifer  that  lows  in  the  upland  farm, 
Far  heard,  lows  not  thine  ear  to  charm." 

But  the  ear  is  charmed,  nevertheless,  especially  if  it 
be  not  too  near,  and  the  air  be  still  and  dense,  or  hol- 
low, as  the  farmer  says.  And  again,  if  it  be  spring- 
time and  she  task  that  powerful  bellows  of  hers  to  its 
utmost  capacity,  how  round  the  sound  is,  and  how  far 
it  goes  over  the  hills. 

The  cow  has  at  least  four  tones  or  lows.  First, 
there  is  her  alarmed  or  distressed  low,  when  deprived 
of  her  calf,  or  separated  from  her  mates  —  her  low 
of  affection.  Then  there  is  her  call  of  hunger,  a  pe- 
tition for  food,  sometimes  full  of  impatience,  or  her 
answer  to  the  farmer's  call,  full  of  eagerness.  Then 
there  is  that  peculiar  frenzied  bawl  she  utters  on 
smelling  blood,  which  causes  every  member  of  the 
herd  to  lift  its  head  and  hasten  to  the  spot  —  the  na- 
tive cry  of  the  clan.  When  she  is  gored  or  in  great 
danger  she  bawls  also,  but  that  is  different.     And 


OUR  RURAL   DIVINITY.  137 

lastly,  there  is  the  long,  sonorous  volley  she  lets  off 
on  the  hills  or  in  the  yard,  or  along  the  highway,  and 
which  seems  to  be  expressive  of  a  kind  of  unrest  and 
vague  longing  —  the  longing  of  the  imprisoned  Io  for 
her  lost  identity.  She  sends  her  voice  forth  so  that 
every  god  on  Mount  Olympus  can  hear  her  plaint. 
She  makes  this  sound  in  the  morning,  especially  in 
the  spring,  as  she  goes  forth  to  graze. 

One  of  our  rural  poets,  Myron  Benton,  whose  verse 
often  has  the  flavor  of  sweet  cream,  has  written  some 
lines  called  "  Rumination,"  in  which  the  cow  is  the 
principal  figure,  and  with  which  I  am  permitted  to 
adorn  my  theme.  The  poet  first  gives  his  attention 
to  a  little  brook  that  "  breaks  its  shallow  gossip  "  at 
his  feet  and  "  drowns  the  oriole's  voice :  " — 

"  But  moveth  not  that  wise  and  ancient  cow, 
Who  chews  her  juicy  cud  so  languid  now 
Beneath  her  favorite  elm,  whose  drooping  bough 
Lulls  all  but  inward  vision,  fast  asleep : 
But  still,  her  tireless  tail  a  pendulum  sweep 
Mysterious  clock-work  guides,  and  some  hid  pulley 
Her  drowsy  cud,  each  moment,  raises  duly. 

11  Of  this  great,  wondrous  world  she  has  seen  more 
Than  you,  my  little  brook,  and  cropped  its  store 
Of  succulent  grass  on  many  a  mead  and  lawn; 
And  strayed  to  distant  uplands  in  the  dawn, 
And  she  has  had  some  dark  experience 
Of  graceless  man's  ingratitude  ;  and  hence 
Her  ways  have  not  been  ways  of  pleasantness, 
Nor  all  her  paths  of  peace.    But  her  distress 
And  grief  she  has  lived  past;  your  giddy  round 
Disturbs  her  not,  for  she  is  learned  profound 


138  OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

In  deep  brahminical  philosophy. 
She  chews  the  cud  of  sweetest  revery 
Above  your  wordly  prattle,  brooklet  merry, 
Oblivious  of  all  things  sublunary." 

The  cow  figures  in  Grecian  mythology,  and  in  the 
Oriental  literature  is  treated  as  a  sacred  animal. 
"  The  clouds  are  cows  and  the  rain  milk."  I  remem- 
ber what  Herodotus  says  of  the  Egyptians'  worship 
of  heifers  and  steers;  and  in  the  traditions  of  the 
Celtic  nations  the  cow  is  regarded  as  a  divinity.  In 
Norse  mythology  the  milk  of  the  cow  Andhumbla 
afforded  nourishment  to  the  Frost  giants,  and  it  was 
she  that  licked  into  being  and  into  shape  a  god,  the 
father  of  Odin.  If  anything  could  lick  a  god  into 
shape,  certainly  the  cow  could  do  it.  You  may  see 
her  perform  this  office  for  young  Taurus  any  spring. 
She  licks  him  out  of  the  fogs  and  bewilderments  and 
uncertainties  in  which  he  finds  himself  on  first  land- 
ing upon  these  shores,  and  up  on  to  his  feet  in  an  in- 
credibly short  time.  Indeed,  that  potent  tongue  of 
hers  can  almost  make  the  dead  alive  any  day,  and  the 
creative  lick  of  the  old  Scandinavian  mother  cow 
is  only  a  large-lettered  rendering  of  the  commonest 
facts. 

The  horse  belongs  to  the  fiery  god  Mars.  He  fa- 
vors war,  and  is  one  of  its  oldest,  most  available,  and 
most  formidable  engines.  The  steed  is  clothed  with 
thunder,  and  smells  the  battle  from  afar ;  but  the  cat- 
tle upon  a  thousand  hills  denote  that  peace  and  plenty 
bear  sway  in  the  land.     The  neighing  of  the  horse 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY.  139 

is  a  call  to  battle ;  but  the  lowing  of  old  Brockleface 
in  the  valley  brings  the  golden  age  again.  The  sav- 
age tribes  are  never  without  the  horse ;  the  Scythians 
are  all  mounted ;  but  the  cow  would  tame  and  hu- 
manize them.  When  the  Indians  will  cultivate  the 
cow,  I  shall  think  their  civilization  fairly  begun.  Re- 
cently, when  the  horses  were  sick  with  the  epizootic, 
and  the  oxen  came  to  the  city  and  helped  to  do  their 
work,  what  an  Arcadian  air  again  filled  the  streets. 
But  the  dear  old  oxen  —  how  awkward  and  distressed 
they  looked !  Juno  wept  in  the  face  of  every  one  of 
them.  The  horse  is  a  true  citizen,  and  is  entirely  at 
home  in  the  paved  streets ;  but  the  ox  —  what  a 
complete  embodiment  of  all  rustic  and  rural  things ! 
Slow,  deliberate,  thick-skinned,  powerful,  hulky,  ru- 
minating, fragrant-breathed,  when  he  came  to  town 
the  spirit  and  suggestion  of  all  Georgics  and  Bucolics 
came  with  him.  O  citizen,  was  it  only  a  plodding, 
unsightly  brute  that  went  by  ?  Was  there  no  chord 
in  your  bosom,  long  silent,  that  sweetly  vibrated  at 
the  sight  of  that  patient,  Herculean  couple?  Did 
you  smell  no  hay  or  cropped  herbage,  see  no  summer 
pastures  with  circles  of  cool  shade,  hear  no  voice  of 
herds  among  the  hills  ?  They  were  very  likely  the 
only  horses  your  grandfather  ever  had.  Not  much 
trouble  to  harness  and  unharness  them.  Not  much 
vanity  on  the  road  in  those  days.  They  did  all  the 
work  on  the  early  pioneer  farm.  They  were  the  gods 
whose  rude  strength  first  broke  the  soil.  They  could 
live  where  the  moose  and  the  deer  could.     If  there 


140  OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

was  no  clover  or  timothy  to  be  had,  then  the  twigs  of 
the  basswood  and  birch  would  do.  Before  there  were 
yet  fields  given  up  to  grass,  they  found  ample  past- 
urage in  the  woods.  Their  wide-spreading  horns 
gleamed  in  the  duskiness,  and  their  paths  and  the 
paths  of  the  cows  became  the  future  roads  and  high- 
ways, or  even  the  streets  of  great  cities. 

All  the  descendants  of  Odin  show  a  bovine  trace, 
and  cherish  and  cultivate  the  cow.  In  Norway  she 
is  a  great  feature.  Prof.  Boyesen  describes  what 
he  calls  the  Sceter,  the  spring  migration  of  the  dairy 
and  dairy  maids,  with  all  the  appurtenances  of  butter 
and  cheese-making,  from  the  valleys  to  the  distant 
plains  upon  the  mountains,  where  the  grass  keeps  fresh 
and  tender  till  fall.  It  is  the  great  event  of  the  year 
in  all  the  rural  districts.  Nearly  the  whole  family  go 
with  the  cattle  and  remain  with  them.  At  evening 
the  cows  are  summoned  home  with  a  long  horn, 
called  the  loor,  in  the  hands  of  the  milk-maid.  The 
whole  herd  comes  winding  down  the  mountain  side 
toward  the  Sceter  in  obedience  to  the  mellow  blast. 

What  were  those  old  Vikings  but  thick-hided  bulls 
that  delighted  in  nothing  so  much  as  goring  each 
other  ?  And  has  not  the  charge  of  beefiness  been 
brought  much  nearer  home  to  us  than  that  ?  But 
about  all  the  northern  races  there  is  something  that 
is  kindred  to  cattle  in  the  best  sense  —  something  in 
their  art  and  literature  that  is  essentially  pastoral 
sweet-breathed,  continent,  dispassionate,  ruminating, 
wide-eyed,  soft- voiced  —  a  charm  of  kine,  the  virtue 
of  brutes. 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY.  Ill 

The  cow  belongs  more  especially  to  the  northern 
peoples,  to  the  region  of  the  good,  green  grass.  She 
is  the  true  grazing  animal.  That  broad,  smooth,  al- 
ways dewy  nose  of  hers  is  just  the  suggestion  of 
green  sward.  She  caresses  the  grass ;  she  sweeps 
off  the  ends  of  the  leaves ;  she  reaps  it  with  the 
soft  sickle  of  her  tongue.  She  crops  close,  but  she 
does  not  bruise  or  devour  the  turf  like  the  horse. 
She  is  the  sward's  best  friend,  and  will  make  it  thick 
and  smooth  as  a  carpet. 

11  The  turfy  mountains  where  live  the  nibbling  sheep  " 

are  not  for  her.  Her  muzzle  is  too  blunt ;  then  she 
does  not  bite  as  do  the  sheep ;  she  has  not  upper 
teeth  ;  she  crops.  But  on  the  lower  slopes,  and  mar- 
gins, and  rich  bottoms,  she  is  at  home.  Where  the 
daisy  and  the  buttercup  and  clover  bloom,  and  where 
corn  will  grow,  is  her  proper  domain.  The  agricult- 
ure of  no  country  can  long  thrive  without  her.  Not 
only  a  large  part  of  the  real,  but  much  of  the  poten- 
tial wealth  of  the  land  is  wrapped  up  in  her. 

Then  the  cow  has  given  us  some  good  words  and 
hints.  How  could  we  get  along  without  the  parable 
of  the  cow  that  gave  a  good  pail  of  milk  and  then 
kicked  it  over.  One  could  hardly  keep  house  without 
it.  Or  the  parable  of  the  cream  and  the  skimmed  milk, 
or  of  the  buttered  bread?  We  know,  too,  through  her 
aid,  what  the  horns  of  the  dilemma  mean,  and  what 
comfort  there  is  in  the  juicy  cud  of  re  very. 

I  have  said  the  cow  has  not  been  of  much  service 


142  OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

to  the  poets,  and  yet  I  remember  that  Jean  Ingelow 
could  hardly  have  managed  her  "  High  Tide  "  without 
"  Whitefoot "  and  "  Lightfoot "  and  "  Cusha  !  Cusha  ! 
Cusha'  calling ;  "  or  Trowbridge  his  "  Evening  at  the 
Farm,"  in  which  the  real  call  of  the  American  farm- 
boy,  of  "  Co',  boss !  Co',  boss !  Co,'  Co',"  makes  a 
very  musical  refrain. 

Tennyson's  charming  "  Milking  Song  "  is  another 
flower  of  poesy  that  has  sprang  up  in  my  divinity's 
footsteps. 

What  a  variety  of  individualities  a  herd  of  cows 
presents  when  you  have  come  to  know  them  all,  not 
only  in  form  and  color,  but  in  manners  and  disposi- 
tion. Some  are  timid  and  awkward,  and  the  butt  of 
the  whole  herd.  Some  remind  you  of  deer.  Some 
have  an  expression  in  the  face  like  certain  persons 
you  have  known.  A  petted  and  well-fed  cow  has  a 
benevolent  and  gracious  look ;  an  ill-used  and  poorly- 
fed  one  a  pitiful  and  forlorn  look.  Some  cows  have 
a  masculine  or  ox  expression ;  others  are  extremely 
feminine.  The  latter  are  the  ones  for  milk.  Some 
cows  will  kick  like  a  horse ;  some  jump  fences  like 
deer.  Every  herd  has  its  ringleader,  its  unruly  spirit 
—  one  that  plans  all  the  mischief  and  leads  the  rest 
through  the  fences  into  the  grain  or  into  the  orchard. 
This  one  is  usually  quite  different  from  the  master 
spirit,  the  "  boss  of  the  yard."  The  latter  is  gener- 
ally the  most  peaceful  and  law-abiding  cow  iu  the  lot, 
and  the  least  bullying  and  quarrelsome.  But  she  is 
not   to   be  trifled  with;  her  will  is  law;  the  whole 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY.  143 

herd  give  way  before  her,  those  that  have  crossed 
horns  with  her,  and  those  that  have  not,  but  yielded 
their  allegiance  without  crossing.  I  remember  such 
a  one  among  my  father's  milkers  when  I  was  a  boy 
—  a  slender-horned,  deep-shouldered,  large-uddered 
dewlapped  old  cow  that  we  always  put  first  in  the 
long  stable  so  she  could  not  have  a  cow  on  each  side 
of  her  to  forage  upon ;  for  the  master  is  yielded  to 
no  less  in  the  stanchions  than  in  the  yard.  She  al- 
ways had  the  first  place  anywhere.  She  had  her 
choice  of  standing  room  in  the  milking  yard,  and 
when  she  wanted  to  lie  down  there  or  in  the  fields 
the  best  and  softest  spot  was  hers.  When  the  herd 
were  foddered  from  the  stack  or  barn,  or  fed  with 
pumpkins  in  the  fall,  she  was  always  first  served. 
Her  demeanor  was  quiet  but  impressive.  She  never 
bullied  or  gored  her  mates,  but  literally  ruled  them 
with  the  breath  of  her  nostrils.  If  any  new-comer  or 
ambitious  younger  cow,  however,  chafed  under  her 
supremacy,  she  was  ever  ready  to  make  good  her 
claims.  And  with  what  spirit  she  would  fight  when 
openly  challenged !  She  was  a  whirlwind  of  pluck  and 
valor  ;  and  not  after  one  defeat  or  two  defeats  would 
she  yield  the  championship.  The  boss  cow,  when 
overcome,  seems  to  brood  over  her  disgrace,  and  day 
after  day  will  meet  her  rival  in  fierce  combat. 

A  friend  of  mine,  a  pastoral  philosopher,  whom  I 
have  consulted  in  regard  to  the  master  cow,  thinks  it 
is  seldom  the  case  that  one  rules  all  the  herd,  if  it 
number  many,  but  that  there  is  often  one  that  will  rule 


144  OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY. 

nearly  all.  "  Curiously  enough,"  he  says,  "  a  case 
like  this  will  often  occur :  No.  1  will  whip  No.-  2 ; 
No.  2  whips  No.  3,  and  No.  3  whips  No.  1  ;  so  around 
in  a  circle.  This  is  not  a  mistake ;  it  is  often  the 
case.  I  remember,"  he  continued, "  we  once  had  feed- 
ing out  of  a  large  bin  in  the  centre  of  the  yard  six 
oxen  who  mastered  right  through  in  succession  from 
No.  1  to  No.  6 ;  but  No.  6  paid  off  the  score  by  whip- 
ping No.  1.  I  often  watched  them  when  they  were 
all  trying  to  feed  out  of  the  box,  and  of  course  trying, 
dog-in-the-manager  fashion,  each  to  prevent  any  other 
he  could.  They  would  often  get  in  the  order  to  do 
it  very  systematically,  since  they  could  keep  rotating 
about  the  box  till  the  chain  happened  to  get  broken 
somewhere,  when  there  would  be  confusion.  Their 
mastership,  you  know,  like  that  between  nations,  is 
constantly  changing.  But  there  are  always  Napo- 
leons who  hold  their  own  through  many  vicissitudes ; 
but  the  ordinary  cow  is  continually  liable  to  lose  her 
foothold.  Some  cow  she  has  always  despised,  and  has 
often  sent  tossing  across  the  yard  at  her  horns'  ends, 
some  pleasant  morning  will  return  the  compliment 
and  pay  off  old  scores." 

But  my  own  observation  has  been  that  in  herds 
in  which  there  have  been  no  important  changes  for 
several  years,  the  question  of  might  gets  pretty  well 
settled,  and  some  one  cow  becomes  the  acknowledged 
ruler. 

The  bully  of  the  yard  is  never  the  master,  but  usu- 
ally a  second  or  third  rate  pusher  that  never  loses 


OUR  RURAL   DIVINITY.  145 

an  opportunity  to  hook  those  beneath  her,  or  to  'gore 
the  masters  if  she  can  get  them  in  a  tight  place.  If 
such  a  one  can  get  loose  in  the  stable,  she  is  quite 
certain  to  do  mischief.  She  delights  to  pause  in  the 
open  bars  and  turn  and  keep  those  at  bay  behind  her 
till  she  sees  a  pair  of  threatening  horns  pressing  to- 
wards her,  when  she  quickly  passes  on.  As  one  cow 
masters  all,  so  there  is  one  cow  that  is  mastered  by  all. 
These  are  the  two  extremes  of  the  herd,  the  head  and 
the  tail.  Between  them  are  all  grades  of  authority, 
with  none  so  poor  but  hath  some  poorer  to  do  her 
reverence. 

The  cow  has  evidently  come  down  to  us  from  a 
wild  or  semi-wild  state ;  perhaps  is  a  descendant  of 
those  wild,  shaggy  cattle  of  which  a  small  band  is  still 
preserved  in  some  nobleman's  park  in  Scotland.  Cu- 
vier  seems  to  have  been  of  this  opinion.  One  of  the 
ways  in  which  her  wild  instincts  still  crop  out  is  the 
disposition  she  shows  in  spring  to  hide  her  calf — a 
common  practice  among  the  wild  herds.  Her  wild 
nature  would  be  likely  to  come  to  the  surface  at  this 
crisis  if  ever ;  and  I  have  known  cows  that  practiced 
great  secrecy  in  dropping  their  calves.  As  their  time 
approached  they  grew  restless,  a  wild  and  excited  look 
was  upon  them,  and  if  left  free,  they  generally  set 
out  for  the  woods  or  for  some  other  secluded  spot. 
After  the  calf  is  several  hours  old,  and  has  got  upon 
its  feet  and  had  its  first  meal,  the  dam  by  some  sign 
commands  it  to  lie  down  and  remain  quiet  while  she 
goes  forth  to  feed.  If  the  calf  is  approached  at  such 
10 


146  •      OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

time  it  plays  "  possum,"  assumes  to  be  dead  or  asleep, 
till  on  finding  this  ruse  does  not  succeed,  it  mounts 
to  its  feet,  bleats  loudly  and  fiercely,  and  charges  des- 
perately upon  the  intruder.  But  it  recovers  from  this 
wild  scare  in  a  little  while,  and  never  shows  signs  of 
it  again. 

The  habit  of  the  cow,  also,  in  eating  the  placenta, 
looks  to  me  like  a  vestige  of  her  former  wild  instincts 

—  the  instinct  to  remove  everything  that  would  give 
the  wild  beasts  a  clew  or  a  scent,  and  so  attract  them 
to  her  helpless  young. 

How  wise  and  sagacious  the  cows  become  that  run 
upon  the  street,  or  pick  their  living  along  the  high- 
way. The  mystery  of  gates  and  bars  is  at  last  solved 
to  them.  They  ponder  over  them  by  night,  they 
lurk  about  them  by  day,  till  they  acquire  a  new  sense 

—  till  they  become  en  rapport  with  them  and  know 
when  they  are  open  and  unguarded.  The  garden 
gate,  if  it  open  into  the  highway  at  any  point,  is 
never  out  of  the  mind  of  these  roadsters,  or  out  of 
their  calculations.  They  calculate  upon  the  chances 
of  its  being  left  open  a  certain  number  of  times  in 
the  season ;  and  if  it  be  but  once  and  only  for  five 
minutes,  your  cabbage  and  sweet  corn  suffer.  What 
villager,  or  countryman  either,  has  not  been  awak- 
ened at  night  by  the  squeaking  and  crunching  of 
those  piratical  jaws  under  the  window  or  in  the  di- 
rection of  the  vegetable  patch  ?  I  have  had  the  cows, 
after  they  had  eaten  up  my  garden,  break  into  the 
stable  where  my  own  milcher  was  tied,  and  gore  her 


OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY.  147 

and  devour  her  meal.  Yes,  life  presents  but  one  ab- 
sorbing problem  to  the  street  cow,  and  that  is  how 
to  get  into  your  garden.  She  catches  glimpses  of  it 
over  the  fence  or  through  the  pickets,  and  her  imagi- 
nation or  epigastrium  is  inflamed.  When  the  spot  is 
surrounded  by  a  high  board  fence,  I  think  I  have  seen 
her  peeping  at  the  cabbages  through  a  knot-hole. 
At  last  she  learns  to  open  the  gate.  It  is  a  great  tri- 
umph of  bovine  wit.  She  does  it  with  her  horn  or 
her  nose,  or  may  be  with  her  ever  ready  tongue.  I 
doubt  if  she  has  ever  yet  penetrated  the  mystery 
of  the  newer  patent  fastenings;  but  the  old-fash- 
ioned thumb-latch  she  can  see  through,  give  her  time 
enough. 

A  large,  lank,  muley  or  polled  cow  used  to  annoy 
me  in  this  way  when  I  was  a  dweller  in  a  certain  pas- 
toral city.  I  more  than  half  suspected  she  was  turned 
in  by  some  one  ;  so  one  day  I  watched.  Presently  I 
heard  the  gate-latch  rattle  ;  the  gate  swung  open,  and 
in  walked  the  old  buffalo.  On  seeing  me  she  turned 
and  ran  like  a  horse.  I  then  fastened  the  gate  on  the 
Inside  and  watched  again.  After  long  waiting  the  old 
cow  came  quickly  round  the  corner  and  approached 
the  gate.  She  lifted  the  latch  with  her  nose.  Then 
as  the  gate  did  not  move,  she  lifted  it  again  and 
again.  Then  she  gently  nudged  it.  Then,  the  obtuse 
gate  not  taking  the  hint,  she  butted  it  gently,  then 
harder  and  still  harder,  till  it  rattled  again.  At  this 
juncture  I  emerged  from  my  hiding  place,  when  the 
old   villain    scampered  off  with   great  precipitation. 


148  OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY. 

She  knew  she  was  trespassing,  and  she  had  learned 
that  there  were  usually  some  swift  penalties  attached 
to  this  pastime. 

I  have  owned  but  three  cows  and  loved  but  one. 
That  was  the  first  one,  Chloe,  a  bright-red,  curly- 
pated,  golden -skinned  Devonshire  cow,  that  an  ocean 
steamer  landed  for  me  upon  the  banks  of  the  Potomac 
one  bright  May  Day  many  clover  summers  ago.  She 
came  from  the  north,  from  the  pastoral  regions  of  the 
Catskills,  to  graze  upon  the  broad  commons  of  the 
national  capital.  I  was  then  the  fortunate  and  happy 
lessee  of  an  old  place  with  an  acre  of  ground  attached, 
almost  within  the  shadow  of  the  dome  of  the  capitol. 
Behind  a  high  but  aged  and  decrepit  board  fence  I 
indulged  my  rural  and  unclerical  tastes.  I  could  look 
up  from  my  homely  tasks  and  cast  a  potato  almost  in 
the  midst  of  that  cataract  of  marble  steps  that  flows 
out  of  the  north  wing  of  the  patriotic  pile.  Ah,  when 
that  creaking  and  sagging  back  gate  closed  behind  me 
in  the  evening,  I  was  happy  ;  and  when  it  opened  for 
my  egress  thence  in  the  morning,  I  was  not  happy. 
Inside  that  gate  was  a  miniature  farm  redolent  or" 
homely,  primitive  life,  a  tumble-down  house  and  sta- 
bles and  implements  of  agriculture  and  horticulture, 
broods  of  chickens,  and  growing  pumpkins,  and  a 
thousand  antidotes  to  the  weariness  of  an  artificial 
life.  Outside  of  it  were  the  marble  and  iron  palaces, 
the  paved  and  blistering  streets,  and  the  high,  vacant 
mahogany  desk  of  a  government  clerk.  In  that  an- 
cient inclosure  I  took  an  earth  bath  twice  a  day.     I 


OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY.  149 

planted  myself  as  deep  in  the  soil  as  I  could  to  re- 
store the  normal  tone  and  freshness  of  my  system, 
impaired  by  the  above  mentioned  government  ma- 
hogany. I  have  found  there  is  nothing  like  the  earth 
to  draw  the  various  social  distempers  out  of  one.  The 
blue  devils  take  flight  at  once  if  they  see  you  mean  to 
bury  them  and  make  compost  of  them.  Emerson  in- 
timates that  the  scholar  had  better  not  try  to  have 
two  gardens  ;  but  I  could  never  spend  an  hour  hoeing 
up  dock  and  red-root  and  twitch  grass  without  in  some 
way  getting  rid  of  many  weeds  and  fungus,  unwhole- 
some growths  that  a  petty,  in-doors  life  was  forever 
fostering  in  my  own  moral  and  intellectual  nature. 

But  the  finishing  touch  was  not  given  till  Chloe 
came.  She  was  the  jewel  for  which  this  homely  set- 
ting waited.  My  agriculture  had  some  object  then. 
The  old  gate  never  opened  with  such  alacrity  as  when 
she  paused  before  it.  How  we  waited  for  her  com- 
ing! Should  I  send  Drewer,  the  colored  patriarch, 
for  her  ?  No  ;  the  master  of  the  house  himself  should 
receive  Juno  at  the  capital. 

"  One  cask  for  you,"  said  the  clerk,  referring  to  the 
steamer  bill  of  lading. 

"  Then  I  hope  it 's  a  cask  of  milk,"  I  said.  u  I  ex- 
pected a  cow." 

"  One  cask  it  says  here." 

"  Well,  let 's  see  it ;  I  '11  warrant  it  has  horns  and  is 
tied  by  a  rope  ;  "  which  proved  to  be  the  case,  for 
there  stood  the  only  object  that  bore  my  name,  chew- 
ing its  cud,  on  the  forward  deck.     How  she  liked  the 


150  OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY. 

voyage  I  could  not  find  out ;  but  she  seemed  to  relish 
so  much  the  feeling  of  solid  ground  beneath  her  feet 
once  more  that  she  led  me  a  lively  step  all  the  way 
home.  She  cut  capers  in  front  of  the  White  House, 
and  tried  twice  to  wind  me  up  in  the  rope  as  we 
passed  the  Treasury.  She  kicked  up  her  heels  on 
the  broad  avenue  and  became  very  coltish  as  she  came 
under  the  walls  of  the  Capitol.  But  that  night  the 
long- vacant  stall  in  the  old  stable  was  filled,  aud  the 
next  morning  the  coffee  had  met  with  a  change  of 
heart.  I  had  to  go  out  twice  with  the  lantern  and 
survey  my  treasure  before  I  went  to  bed.  Did  she 
not  come  from  the  delectable  mountains,  and  did  I 
not  have  a  sort  of  filial  regard  for  her  as  toward  my 
foster  mother  ? 

This  was  during  the  Arcadian  age  at  the  capital, 
before  the  easy-going  southern  ways  had  gone  out  and 
the  prim  new  northern  ways  had  come  in,  and  when 
the  domestic  animals  were  treated  with  distinguished 
consideration  and  granted  the  freedom  of  the  city. 
There  was  a  charm  of  cattle  in  the  streets  and  upon 
the  commons :  goats  cropped  your  rose-bushes  through 
the  pickets,  and  nooned  upon  your  front  porch,  and 
pigs  dreamed  Arcadian  dreams  under  your  garden 
fence  or  languidly  frescoed  it  with  pigments  from  the 
nearest  pool.  It  was  a  time  of  peace ;  it  was  the 
poor  man's  golden  age.  Your  cow,  or  your  goat,  or 
your  pig  led  a  vagrant,  wandering  life,  and  picked 
up  a  subsistence  wherever  they  could,  like  the  bees, 
which  was  almost  everywhere.     Your  cow  went  forth 


OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY.  151 

in  the  morning  and  came  home  fraught  with  milk  at 
night,  and  you  never  troubled  yourself  where  she 
went  or  how  far  she  roamed. 

Chloe  took  very  naturally  to  this  kind  of  life.  At 
first  I  had  to  go  with  her  a  few  times  and  pilot  her  to 
the  nearest  commons,  and  then  left  her  to  her  own 
wit,  which  never  failed  her.  What  adventures  she 
had,  what  acquaintances  she  made,  how  far  she  wan- 
dered, I  never  knew.  I  never  came  across  her  in 
my  walks  or  rambles.  Indeed,  on  several  occasions 
I  thought  I  would  look  her  up  and  see  her  feeding  in 
national  pastures,  but  I  never  could  find  her.  There 
were  plenty  of  cows,  but  they  were  all  strangers. 
But  punctually,  between  four  and  five  o'clock  in  the 
afternoon,  her  white  horns  would  be  seen  tossing 
above  the  gate  and  her  impatient  low  be  heard. 
Sometimes,  when  I  turned  her  forth  in  the  morning, 
she  would  pause  and  apparently  consider  which  way 
she  would  go.  Should  she  go  toward  Kendall  Green 
to-day,  or  follow  the  Tiber,  or  over  by  the  Big 
Spring,  or  out  around  Lincoln  Hospital  ?  She  sel- 
dom reached  a  conclusion  till  she  had  stretched  forth 
her  neck  and  blown  a  blast  on  her  trumpet  that 
awoke  the  echoes  in  the  very  lantern  on  the  dome  of 
the  Capitol.  Then,  after  one  or  two  licks,- she  would 
disappear  around  the  corner.  Later  in  the  season, 
when  the  grass  was  parched  or  poor  on  the  commons, 
and  the  corn  and  cabbage  tempting  in  the  garden, 
Chloe  was  loath  to  depart  in  the  morning,  and  her 
deliberations  were  longer  than  ever,  and  very  often  I 
had  to  aid  her  in  coming  to  a  decision. 


152  OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY. 

For  two  summers  she  was  a  well-spring  of  pleasure 
and  profit  in  my  farm  of  one  acre,  when  in  an  evil 
moment  I  resolved  to  part  with  her  and  try  another. 
In  an  evil  moment  I  say,  for  from  that  time  my  luck 
in  cattle  left  me.  The  goddess  never  forgave  me  the 
execution  of  that  rash  and  cruel  resolve. 

The  day  is  indelibly  stamped  on  my  memory  when 
I  exposed  my  Chloe  for  sale  in  the  public  market- 
place. It  was  in  November,  a  bright,  dreamy,  Indian 
summer  day.  A  sadness  oppressed  me,  not  unmixed 
with  guilt  and  remorse.  An  old  Irish  woman  came 
to  the  market  also  with  her  pets  to  sell,  a  sow  and 
five  pigs,  and  took  up  a  position  next  me.  We  con- 
doled with  each  other ;  we  bewailed  the  fate  of  our 
darlings  together ;  we  berated  in  chorus  the  white- 
aproned  but  blood-stained  fraternity  who  prowled 
about  us.  When  she  went  away  for  a  moment  I 
minded  the  pigs,  and  when  I  strolled  about  she 
minded  my  cow.  How  shy  the  innocent  beast  was 
of  those  carnal  market-men.  How  she  would  shrink 
away  from  them.  When  they  put  out  a-  hand  to 
feel  her  condition  she  would  "  scrooch "  down  her 
back,  or  bend  this  way  or  that,  as  if  the  hand  were  a 
branding  iron.  So  long  as  I  stood  by  her  head  she 
felt  safe  —  deluded  creature  —  and  chewed  the  cud 
of  sweet  content ;  but  the  moment  I  left  her  side 
she  seemed  filled  with  apprehension,  and  followed 
me  with  her  eyes,  lowing  softly  and  entreatingly  till  I 
returned. 

At  last  the  money  was  counted  out  for  her,  and  her 


OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY.  153 

-rope  surrendered  to  the  hand  of  another.  How  that 
last  look  of  alarm  and  incredulity,  which  I  caught  as 
I  turned  for  a  parting  glance,  went  to  my  heart ! 

Her  stall  was  soon  filled,  or  partly  filled,  and  this 
time  with  a  native  —  a  specimen  of  what  may  be 
called  the  cornstalk  breed  of  Virginia :  a  slender,  fur- 
tive, long-geared  heifer  just  verging  on  cowhood,  that 
in  spite  of  my  best  efforts  would  wear  a  pinched  and 
hungry  look.  She  evidently  inherited  a  humped 
back.  It  was  a  family  trait,  and  .evidence  of  the 
purity  of  her  blood.  For  the  native  blooded  cow 
of  Virginia,  from  shivering  over  half  rations  of  corn 
stalks,  in  the  open  air,  during  those  bleak  and  windy 
winters,  and  roaming  over  those  parched  fields  in 
summer,  has  come  to  have  some  marked  features, 
tor  one  thing,  her  pedal  extremities  seemed  length- 
ened ;  for  another,  her  udder  does  not  impede  her 
traveling ;  for  a  third,  her  backbone  inclines  strongly 
to  the  curve ;  then,  she  despiseth  hay.  This  last  is  a 
sure  test.  Offer  a  thorough-bred  Virginia  cow  hay, 
and  she  will  laugh  in  your  face ;  but  rattle  the  husks 
or  shucks,  and  she  knows  you  to  be  her  friend. 

The  new  comer  even  declined  corn  meal  at  first. 
She  eyed  it  furtively,  then  sniffed  it  suspiciously,  but 
finally  discovered  that  it  bore  some  relation  to  her 
native  "  shucks,"  when  she  fell  to  eagerly. 

I  cherish  the  memory  of  this  cow,  however,  as  the 
most  affectionate  brute  I  ever  knew.  Being  deprived 
of  her  calf,  she  transferred  her  affections  to  her  mas- 
ter, and  would  fain  have  made  a  calf  of  him,  lowing 


154  OUR   RURAL  DIVINITY. 

in  the  most  piteous  and  inconsolable  manner  when  he 
was  out  of  her  sight,  hardly  forgetting  her  grief  long 
enough  to  eat  her  meal,  and  entirely  neglecting  her 
beloved  husks.  Often  in  the  middle  of  the  night  she 
would  set  up  that  sonorous  lamentation  and  continue 
it  till  sleep  was  chased  from  every  eye  in  the  house- 
hold. This  generally  had  the  effect  of  bringing  the 
object  of  her  affection  before  her,  but  in  a  mood  any- 
thing but  filial  or  comforting.  Still,  at  such  times  a 
kick  seemed  a  comfort  to  her,  and  she  would  gladly 
have  kissed  the  rod  that  was  the  instrument  of  my 
midnight  wrath. 

But  her  tender  star  was  destined  soon  to  a  fatal 
eclipse.  Being  tied  with  too  long  a  rope  on  one  oc- 
casion during  my  temporary  absence,  she  got  her 
head  into  the  meal-barrel,  and  stopped  not  till  she 
had  devoured  nearly  half  a  bushel  of  dry  meal.  The 
singularly  placid  and  benevolent  look  that  beamed 
from  the  meal-besmeared  face  when  I  discovered  her 
was  something  to  be  remembered.  For  the  first 
time  also  her  spinal  column  came  near  assuming  a 
horizontal  line. 

But  the  grist  proved  too  much  for  her  frail  mill, 
and  her  demise  took  place  on  the  third  day,  not  of 
course  without  some  attempt  to  relieve  her  on  my 
part.  I  gave  her,  as  is  usual  in  such  emergencies, 
everything  I  "  could  think  of,"  and  everything  my 
neighbors  could  think  of,  besides  some  fearful  pre- 
scriptions which  I  obtained  from  a  German  veterinary 
surgeon,  but  to  no  purpose.     I  imagined  her  poor 


OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY.  155 

maw  distended  and  inflamed  with  the  baking  sodden 
mass  which  no  physic  could  penetrate  or  enliven. 

Thus  ended  my  second  venture  in  live  stock.  My 
third,  which  followed  sharp  upon  the  heels  of  this  dis- 
aster, was  scarcely  more  of  a  success.  This  time  I 
led  to  the  altar  a  buffalo  cow,  as  they  call  the  "  muley  " 
down  South  —  a  large,  spotted,  creamy-skinned  cow, 
with  a  fine  udder,  that  I  persuaded  a  Jew  drover  to 
part  with  for  ninety  dollars.  "  Pag  like  a  dish  rack 
(rag),"  said  he,  pointing  to  her  udder  after  she  had 
been  milked.  "  You  vill  come  pack  and  gif  me  the 
udder  ten  tollar "  (for  he  had  demanded  an  even  hun- 
dred), he  continued,  "  after  you  have  had  her  a  gouple 
of  days."  True,  I  felt  like  returning  to  him  after  a 
u  gouple  of  days,"  but  not  to  pay  the  other  ten  dol- 
lars. The  cow  proved  to  be  as  blind  as  a  bat,  though 
capable  of  counterfeiting  the  act  of  seeing  to  per- 
fection. For  did  she  not  lift  up  her  head  and  follow 
with  her  eyes  a  dog  that  scaled  the  fence  and  ran 
through  the  other  end  of  the  lot,  and  the  next  mo- 
ment dash  my  hopes  thus  raised  by  trying  to  walk 
over  a  locust  tree  thirty  feet  high  ?  And  when  I  set 
the  bucket  before  her  containing  her  first  mess  of 
meal,  she  missed  it  by  several  inches,  and  her  nose 
brought  up  against  the  ground.  Was  it  a  kind  of 
far-sightedness  and  near  blindness  ?  That  was  it,  I 
think ;  she  had  genius,  but  not  talent ;  she  could  see 
the  man  in  the  moon,  but  was  quite  oblivious  to  the 
man  immediately  in  her  front.  Her  eyes  were  tel- 
escopic and  required  a  long  range. 


156  OUR   RURAL   DIVINITY. 

As  long  as  I  kept  her  in  the  stall,  or  confined  to 
the  inclosure,  this  strange  eclipse  of  her  sight  was  of 
little  consequence.  But  when  spring  came,  and  it 
was  time  for  her  to  go  forth  and  seek  her  livelihood 
in  the  city's  waste  places,  I  was  embarrassed.  Into 
what  remote  corners  or  into  what  terra  incognita 
might  she  not  wander  !  There  was  little  doubt  but 
she  would  drift  around  home  in  the  course  of  the 
summer,  or  perhaps  as  often  as  every  week  or  two ; 
but  could  she  be  trusted  to  find  her  way  back  every 
night  ?  Perhaps  she  could  be  taught.  Perhaps  her 
other  senses  were  acute  enough  to  in  a  measure  com- 
pensate her  for  her  defective  vision.  So  I  gave  her 
lessons  in  the  topography  of  the  country.  I  led  her 
forth  to  graze  for  a  few  hours  each  day  and  led  her 
home  again.  Then  I  left  her  to  come  home  alone, 
which  feat  she  accomplished  very  encouragingly.  She 
came  feeling  her  way  along,  stepping  very  high,  but 
apparently  a  most  diligent  and  interested  sight-seer. 
But  she  was  not  sure  of  the  right  house  when  she  got 
to  it,  though  she  stared  at  it  very  hard. 

Again  I  turned  her  forth,  and  again  she  came  back, 
her  telescopic  eyes  apparently  of  some  service  to  her. 
On  the  third  day  there  was  a  fierce  thunder-storm  late 
in  the  afternoon,  and  old  buffalo  did  not  come  home. 
It  had  evidently  scattered  and  bewildered  what  little 
wit  she  had.  Being  barely  able  to  navigate  those 
streets  on  a  calm  day,  what  could  she  be  expected  to 
do  in  a  tempest  ? 

After  the  storm  had  passed,  and  near  sundown,  I  set 


OUR   RURAL  DIVINITY.  157 

out  in  quest  of  her,  "but  could  get  no  clew.  I  heard 
that  two  cows  had  been  struck  by  lightning  about  a 
mile  out  on  the  commons.  My  conscience  instantly 
told  me  that  one  of  them  was  mine.  It  would  be  a 
fit  closing  of  the  third  act  of  this  pastoral  drama. 
Thitherward  I  bent  my  steps,  and  there  upon  the 
smooth  plain  I  beheld  the  scorched  and  swollen  forms 
of  two  cows  slain  by  thunderbolts,  but  neither  of  them 
had  ever  been  mine. 

The  next  day  I  continued  the  search,  and  the  next, 
and  the  next.  Finally  I  hoisted  an  umbrella  over 
my  head,  for  the  weather  had  become  hot,  and  set 
out  deliberately  and  systematically  to  explore  every 
foot  of  open  common  on  Capitol  hill.  I  tramped 
many  miles,  and  found  every  man's  cow  but  my  own 
—  some  twelve  or  fifteen  hundred,  I  should  think. 
I  saw  many  vagrant  boys  and  Irish  and  colored 
women,  nearly  all  of  whom  had  seen  a  buffalo  cow 
that  very  day  that  answered  exactly  to  my  descrip- 
tion, but  ill  such  diverse  and  widely  separate  places 
that  I  knew  it  was  no  cow  of  mine.  And  it  was 
astonishing  how  many  times  I  was  myself  deceived ; 
how  many  rumps  or  heads,  or  line  backs  or  white 
flanks  I  saw  peeping  over  knolls  or  from  behind 
fences  or  other  objects  that  could  belong  to  no  cow 
but  mine ! 

Finally  I  gave  up  the  search,  concluded  the  cow 
had  been  stolen,  and  advertised  her,  offering  a  reward. 
But  days  passed,  and  no  tidings  were  obtained. 
Hope  began  to  burn  pretty  low  —  was  indeed  on  the 


158  OUR  RURAL  DIVINITY. 

point  of  going  out  altogether,  when  one  afternoon,  as 
I  was  strolling  over  the  commons  (for  in  my  walks  I 
still  hovered  about  the  scenes  of  my  lost  milcher),  I 
saw  the  rump  of  a  ■  cow,  over  a  grassy  knoll,  that 
looked  familiar.  Coming  nearer,  the  beast  lifted  up 
her  head ;  and,  behold !  it  was  she !  only  a  few 
squares  from  home,  where  doubtless  she  had  been 
most  of  the  time.  I  had  overshot  the  mark  in  my 
search.  I  had  ransacked  the  far-off,  and  had  neglected 
the  near-at-hand,  as  we  are  so  apt  to  do.  But  she  was 
ruined  as  a  milcher,  and  her  history  thenceforward 
was  brief  and  touching ! 


BEFOKE   GENIUS. 


BEFORE   GENIUS. 

If  there  did  not  something  else  go  to  the  making 
of  literature  besides  mere  literary  parts,  even  the  best 
of  them,  how  long  ago  the  old  bards  and  Biblical 
writers  would  have  been  superseded  by  the  learned 
professors  and  gentlemanly  versifiers  of  later  times. 
Is  there,  to-day,  a  popular  poet  using  the  English  lan- 
guage, who  does  not,  in  technical  acquirements  and  in 
the  artificial  adjuncts  of  poetry  —  rhyme,  metre,  mel- 
ody, and  especially  sweet,  dainty  fancies  —  surpass 
Europe's  and  Asia's  loftiest  and  oldest  ?  Indeed,  so 
marked  is  the  success  of  the  latter-day  poets  in  this 
respect,  that  any  ordinary  reader  may  well  be  puzzled, 
and  ask,  if  the  shaggy  old  antique  masters  are  poets, 
what  are  the  refined  and  euphonious  producers  of  our 
own  day  ? 

If  we  were  to  inquire  what  this  something  else  is, 
which  is  prerequisite  to  any  deep  and  lasting  success 
in  literature,  we  should  undoubtedly  find  that  it  is 
the  man  behind  the  book.  It  is  the  fashion  of  the 
day  to  attribute  all  splendid  results  to  genius  and  cult- 
ure. But  genius  and  culture  are  not  enough.  "All 
other  knowledge  is  hurtful  to  him  who  has  not  the 
11 


162  BEFORE   GENIUS. 

science  of  honesty  and  goodness,"  says  Montaigne. 
The  quality  of  simple  manhood,  and  the  universal 
human  traits,  which  form  the  bond  of  union  between 
man  and  man,  which  form  the  basis  of  society,  of  the 
family,  of  government,  of  friendship,  are  quite  over- 
looked ;  and  the  credit  is  given  to  some  special  facil- 
ity, or  brilliant  and  lucky  hit.  Does  any  one  doubt 
that  the  great  poets  and  artists  are  made  up  mainly 
of  the  most  common  universal  human  and  heroic 
characteristics  ?  that  in  them,  though  working  to  other 
ends,  is  all  that  construct  the  soldier,  the  sailor,  the 
farmer,  the  discoverer,  the  bringer-to-pass  in  any  field, 
and  that  their  work  is  good  and  enduring  in  propor- 
tion as  it  is  saturated  and  fertilized  by  the  qualities  of 
these  ?  Good  human  stock  is  the  main  dependence. 
No  great  poet  ever  appeared  except  from  a  race  of 
good  fighters,  good  eaters,  good  sleepers,  good  breed- 
ers. Literature  dies  with  the  decay  of  the  un -literary 
element.  It  is  not  in  the  spirit  of  something  far  away 
in  the  clouds  or  under  the  moon,  something  ethereal, 
visionary,  and  anti-mundane,  that  Angelo,  Dante,  and 
Shakespeare  work,  but  in  the  spirit  of  the  common 
Nature,  and  the  homeliest  facts:  through  these,  and 
not  away  from  them,  the  path  of  the  creator  lies. 

It  is  no  doubt  this  tendency,  always  more  or  less 
marked  in  highly  refined  and  cultivated  times,  to  for- 
get or  overlook  the  primary  basic  qualities,  and  parade 
and  make  much  of  verbal  and  technical  acquirements, 
that  led  Huxley  to  speak  with  such  bitter  scorn  of 
the  "  senseless  caterwauling  of  the  literary  classes/' 


BEFORE   GENIUS.  163 

for  this  is  not  the  only  country  in  which  books  are 
produced  that  are  a  mere  skin  of  elegant  words  blown 
up  by  copious  literary  gas. 

In  imaginative  works,  especially,  much  depends 
upon  the  quality  of  mere  weight.  A  stern,  material 
inertia  is  indispensable.  It  is  like  the  immobility  and 
power  of  resistance  of  a  piece  of  ordnance,  upon 
which  the  force  and  efficacy  of  the  projectile  finally 
depend.  In  the  most  daring  flights  of  the  master, 
there  is  still  something  which  remains  indifferent  and 
uncommitted,  and  which  acts  as  reserve  power,  mak- 
ing the  man  always  superior  to  his  work.  He  must 
always  leave  the  impression  that  if  he  wanted  to  pull 
harder  or  fly  higher  he  could  easily  do  so.  In  Homer, 
there  is  much  that  is  not  directly  available  for  Ho- 
mer's purposes  as  poet.  This  is  his  personality  — 
the  real  Homer  —  which  lies  deeper  than  his  talents 
and  skill,  and  which  works  through  these  by  indirec- 
tions. This  gives  the  authority ;  this  is  the  unseen 
backer,  which  makes  every  promise  good. 

What  depths  can  a  man  sound  but  his  own,  or 
what  heights  explore  ?  "  We  carry  within  us,"  says  Sir 
Thomas  Browne,  "  the  wonders  we  seek  without  us." 

Indeed,  there  is  a  strict  moral  or  ethical  dependence 
of  the  capacity  to  conceive  or  project  great  things, 
upon  the  capacity  to  be  or  do  them.  It  is  as  true 
as  any  law  of  hydraulics  or  statics,  that  the  work- 
manship of  a  man  can  never  rise  above  the  level  of 
his  character.  He  can  never  adequately  say  or  do 
anything  greater  than  he  himself  is.      There  is  no 


164  BEFORE   GENIUS. 

such  thing,  for  instance,  as  deep  insight  into  the  mys- 
tery of  Creation,  without  integrity  and  simplicity  of 
character. 

In  the  highest  mental  results  and  conditions  the 
whole  being  sympathizes.  The  perception  of  a  cer- 
tain range  of  truth,  such  as  is  indicated  by  Plato, 
Hegel,  Swedenborg,  and  which  is  very  far  from  what 
is  called  "  religious  "  or  "  moral,"  I  should  regard  as 
the  best  testimonial  that  could  be  offered  of  a  man's 
probity  and  essential  nobility  of  soul.  Is  it  possible 
to  imagine  a  fickle,  inconstant,  or  a  sly,  vain,  mean 
person  reading  and  appreciating  Emerson?  Think 
of  the  real  men  of  science,  the  great  geologists  and 
astronomers,  one  opening  up  time,  the  other  space ! 
Shall  mere  intellectual  acumen  be  accredited  with 
these  immense  results  ?  What  noble  pride,  self-reli- 
ance, and  continuity  of  character  underlie  Newton's 
deductions ! 

Only  those  books  are  for  the  making  of  men  into 
which  a  man  has  gone  in  the  making.  Mere  profes- 
sional skill  and  sleight  of  hand,  of  themselves,  are  to 
be  apprized  as  lightly  in  letters  as  in  war  or  govern- 
ment, or  any  kind  of  leadership.  Strong  native  qual- 
ities only  avail  in  the  long  run ;  and  the  more  these 
dominate  over  the  artificial  endowments,  sloughing  or 
dropping  the  latter  in  the  final  result,  the  more  we 
are  refreshed  and  enlarged.  Who  has  not,  at  some 
period  of  his  life,  been  captivated  by  the  rhetoric  and 
fine  style  of  nearly  all  the  popular  authors  of  the 
Arnold  and  Kingsley  sort  ?  but,  at  last,  waked  up  to 


BEFORE   GENIUS.  165 

discover  that  behind  these  brilliant  names  was  no 
strong,  loving  man,  but  only  a  refined  taste,,  a  fertile 
invention,  or  a  special  talent  of  some  kind  or  another. 

Think  of  the  lather  of  the  modern  novel,  and  the 
fashion-plate  men  and  women  that  figure  in  them. 
What  noble  person  has  Dickens  sketched,  or  has  any 
novelist  since  Scott?  The  utter  poverty  of  "almost 
every  current  novelist  in  any  grand  universal  human 
traits  in  his  own  character,  is  shown  in  nothing  more 
clearly  than  in  the  kind  of  interest  the  reader  takes 
in  his  books.  We  are  led  along  solely  by  the  inge- 
nuity of  the  plot,  and  a  silly  desire  to  see  how  the 
affair  came  out.  What  must  be  the  effect,  Jong  con- 
tinued, of  this  class  of  jugglers  working  upon  the  sym- 
pathies and  the  imagination  of  a  nation  of  gestating 
women  ? 

How  the  best  modern  novel  collapses  before  the 
homely  but  immense  human  significance  of  Homer's 
celestial  swine-herd  entertaining  divine  Ulysses,  or 
even  the  solitary  watchman,  in  iEschylus'  "Agamem- 
non," crouched,  like  a  night-dog,  on  tlie  roofs  of  the 
Atreidie,  waiting  for  the  signal  fires  that  should  an- 
nounce the  fall  of  sacred  Eioni 

But  one  need  not  look  long,  even  in  contemporary 
British  literature,  to  find  a  man.  In  the  author  of 
"  Characteristics "  and  "  Sartor  Resartus,"  we  surely 
encounter  one  of  the  true  heroic  cast.  We  are  made 
aware  that  here  is  something  more  than  a  litterateur, 
something  more  than  genius.  Here  is  veracity, 
homely  directness,  and  sincerity,  and  strong  primary 


166  BEFORE   GENIUS. 

idiosyncracies.  Here  the  man  enters  into  the  esti- 
mate of  the  author.  There  is  no  separating  them,  as 
there  never  is  in  great  examples.  A  curious  perver- 
sity runs  through  all,  but  in  no  way  vitiates  the  re- 
sult. In  both  his  moral  and  intellectual  natures, 
Carlyle  seems  made  with  a  sort  of  stub  and  twist, 
like  the  best  gun-barrels.  The  knotty  and  corru- 
gated character  of  his  sentences  suits  well  the  peculiar 
and  intense  activity  of  his  mind.  What  a  transition 
from  his  terse  and  sharply- articulated  pages,  brimming 
with  character  and  life,  and  a  strange  mixture  of  rage, 
humor,  tenderness,  poetry,  philosophy,  to  the  cold  dis- 
belief and  municipal  splendor  of  Macaulay  !  Nothing 
in  Carlyle's  contributions  seems  fortuitous.  It  all 
flows  from  a  good  and  sufficient  cause  in  the  character 
of  the  man. 

Every  great  man  is,  in  a  certain  way,  an  Atlas,  with 
the  weight  of  the  world  upon  him.  And  if  one  is  to 
criticise  at  all,  he  may  say  that  if  Carlyle  had  not 
been  quite  so  conscious  of  this  weight,  his  work  would 
have  been  better  done.  Yet,  to  whom  do  we  owe 
more,  even  as  Americans?  Anti-democratic  in  his 
opinions,  he  surely  is  not  so  in  spirit,  or  in  the  quality 
of  his  make.  The  nobility  of  labor,  and  the  essential 
nobility  of  man,  were  never  so  effectively  preached 
before.  The  deadliest  enemy  of  Democracy  is  not 
the  warning  or  dissenting  voice.  But  it  is  the  spirit, 
rife  among  us,  which  would  engraft  upon  our  hardy 
Western  stock  the  sickly  and  decayed  standards  of 
the  expiring  feudal  world. 


BEFORE   GENIUS.  167 

"With  two  or  three  exceptions,  there  is  little  as  yet 
in  American  literature  that  shows  much  advance  be- 
yond the  merely  conventional  and  scholastic  —  little, 
I  mean,  in  which  one  gets  a  whiff  of  the  strong  un- 
breathed  air  of  mountain  or  prairie,  or  a  taste  of  rude, 
new  power  that  is  like  the  tonic  of  the  sea.  Thoreau 
occupies  a  niche  by  himself.  Thoreau  was  not  a  great 
personality ;  yet  his  writings  have  a  strong  character- 
istic flavor.  He  is  anti-scorbutic,  like  leeks  and 
onions.     He  has  reference,  also,  to  the  highest  truths. 

It  is  very  likely  true  that  our  most  native  and  orig- 
inal characters  do  not  yet  take  to  literature.  It  is, 
perhaps,  too  early  in  the  day.  Iron  and  lime  have 
to  pass  through  the  vegetable  before  they  can  reach 
the  higher  organization  of  the  animal,  and  may  be  this 
Western  nerve  and  heartiuess  will  yet  emerge  on  the 
intellectual  plane.  Let  us  hope  that  it  will  indeed 
be  Western  nerve  and  heartiness  when  it  gets  there, 
and  not  Eastern  wit  and  epigram ! 

In  Abraham  Lincoln  we  had  a  character  of  very 
marked  and  lofty  type,  the  most  suggestive  study  or 
sketch  of  the  future  American  man  that  has  yet  ap- 
peared in  our  history.  How  broad,  unconventional, 
and  humane  !  How  democratic !  how  adhesive !  No 
fine  arabesque  carvings,  but  strong,  unhewn,  native 
traits,  and  deep  lines  of  care,  toil,  and  human  sympa- 
thy. Lincoln's  Gettysburg  speech  is  one  of  the  most 
genuine  and  characteristic  utterances  in  our  annals. 
It  has  the  true  antique  simplicity  and  impressiveness. 
It  came  straight  from  the  man,  and  is  as  sure  an  in- 


168  BEFORE  GENIUS. 

dex  of  character  as  the  living  voice,  or  the  physiog- 
nomy, or  the  personal  presence  is.  Indeed,  it  may  be 
said  of  Mr.  Lincoln's  entire  course  while  at  the  head 
of  the  nation,  that  no  President,  since  the  first,  ever 
in  his  public  acts  allowed  the  man  so  fully  to  appear, 
or  showed  so  little  disposition  to  retreat  behind  the 
featureless  political  mask  which  seems  to  adhere  to 
the  idea  of  gubernatorial  dignity. 

It  would  hardly  be  fair  to  cite  Everett's  speech  on 
the  same  occasion  as  a  specimen  of  the  opposite  style, 
wherein  ornate  scholarship  and  the  pride  of  talents 
dominate.  Yet  a  stern  critic  would  be  obliged  to  say 
that,  as  an  author,  Everett  allowed,  for  the  most  part, 
only  the  expurgated,  complimenting,  drawing-room 
man  to  speak;  and  that,  considering  the  need  of 
America  to  be  kept  virile  and  broad  at  all  hazards, 
his  contribution,  both  as  man  and  writer,  falls  immeas- 
urably short  of  that  of  Abraham  Lincoln. 

What  a  noble  specimen  of  its  kind,  and  how  free 
from  any  verbal  tricks  or  admixture  of  literary  sauce, 
is  Thoreau's  "  Maine  Woods  "  !  And  what  a  marked 
specimen  of  the  opposite  style  is  a  certain  other  book 
I  could  mention  in  which  these  wild  and  grand  scenes 
serve  but  as  a  medium  to  advertise  the  author's  fund 
of  classic  lore. 

Can  there  be  any  doubt  about  the  traits  and  out- 
ward signs  of  a  noble  character,  and  is  not  the  style 
of  an  author  the  manners  of  his  soul  ? 

Is  there  a  lyceum  lecturer  in  the  country  who  is 
above  manoeuvring  for  the  applause  of  his  audience  ? 


BEFORE   GENIUS.  1(39 

or  a  writer  who  is  willing  to  make  himself  of  no 
account  for  the  sake  of  what  he  has  to  say  ?  Even 
in  the  best,  there  is  something  of  the  air  and  manners 
of  a  performer  on  exhibition.  The  newspaper,  or 
magazine,  or  book,  is  a  sort  of  raised  platform,  upon 
which  the  advertiser  advances  before  a  gaping  and 
expectant  crowd.  Truly,  how  well  he  handles  his 
subject!  He  turns  it  over,  and  around,  and  inside 
out,  and  top  side  down.  He  tosses  it  about ;  he  twirls 
it;  he  takes  it  apart  and  puts  it  together  again,  and 
knows  well  beforehand  where  the  applause  will  come 
in.  Any  reader,  in  taking  up  the  antique  authors, 
must  be  struck  by  the  contrast. 

"In  iEschylus,"  says  Landor,  "  there  is  no  trickery, 
no  trifling,  no  delay,  no  exposition,  no  garrulity,  no 
dogmatism,  no  declamation,  no  prosing,  ....  but  the 
loud  clear  challenge,  the  firm,  unstealthy  step  of  an 
erect,  broad-breasted  soldier." 

On  the  whole,  the  old  authors  are  better  than  the 
new.  The  real  question  of  literature  is  not  simplified 
by  culture  or  a  multiplication  of  books,  as  the  condi- 
tions of  life  are  always  the  same,  and  are  not  made 
one  whit  easier  by  all  the  myriads  of  men  and  women 
who  have  lived  upon  the  globe.  The  standing  want 
is  never  for  more  skill,  but  for  newer,  fresher  power 
—  a  more  plentiful  supply  of  arterial  blood.  The 
discoverer,  or  the  historian,  or  the  man  of  science, 
may  begin  where  his  predecessor  left  off,  but  the  poet, 
or  any  artist,  must  go  back  for  a  fresh  start.  With 
him  it  is  always  the  first  day  of  creation,  and  he  must 
begin  at  the  stump  or  nowhere. 


BEFORE   BEAUTY. 


BEFORE   BEAUTY. 

Before  genius  is  manliness,  and  before  beauty  is 
power.  The  Russian  novelist  and  poet,  Turgeneiff, 
scattered  all  through  whose  works  you  will  find  un- 
mistakable traits  of  greatness,  makes  one  of  his  char- 
acters say,  speaking  of  beauty,  "  The  old  masters  — 
they  never  hunted  after  it;  it  comes  of  itself  into 
their  compositions,  God  knows'  whence,  from  heaven 
or  elsewhere.  The  whole  world  belonged  to  them, 
but  we  are  unable  to  clasp  its  broad  spaces ;  our  arms 
are  too  short." 

From  the  same  depth  of  insight  come  these  lines 
from  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  apropos  of  true  poems :  — 

"  They  do  not  seek  beauty  —  they  are  sought; 
Forever  touching  them,  or  close  upon  them,  follows  beauty,  longing, 
fain,  love-sick." 

The  Roman  was  perhaps  the  first  to  separate  beauty 
from  use,  and  pursue  it  as  ornament  merely.  He  built 
his  grand  edifice  —  its  piers,  its  vaults,  its  walls  of 
brick  and  concrete  —  and  then  gave  it  a  marble  en- 
velope copied  from  the  Greek  architecture.  The  lat- 
ter could  be  stripped  away,  as  in  many  cases  it  was 
by  the  hand  of  time,  and  leave  the  essentials  of  the 


174  BEFORE  BEAUTY. 

structure  nearly  complete.  Not  so  with  the  Greek : 
he  did  not  seek  the  beautiful ;  he  was  beauty ;  his 
building  had  no  ornament,  it  was  all  structure ;  in  its 
beauty  was  the  flower  of  necessity,  the  charm  of  in- 
born fitness  and  proportion.  In  other  words,  "  his  art 
was  structure  refined  into  beautiful  forms,  not  beauti- 
ful forms  superimposed  upon  structure,"  as  with  the 
Roman.  And  it  is  in  Greek  mythology,  is  it  not, 
that  beauty  is  represented  as  riding  upon  the  back  of 
a  lion  ?  as  she  assuredly  always  does  in  their  poetry 
and  art  —  rides  upon  power,  or  terror,  or  savage 
fate ;  not  only  rides  upon  but  is  wedded  and  incor- 
porated with ;  hence  the  athletic  desire  and  refresh- 
ment her  coming  imparts. 

This  is  the  invariable  order  of  Nature.  Beauty 
without  a  rank  material  basis  enfeebles.  The' world 
is  not  thus  made  ;  man  is  not  thus  begotten  and  nour- 
ished. 

It  comes  to  me  there  is  something  implied  or  un- 
derstood when  we  look  upon  a  beautiful  object,  that 
has  quite  as  much  to  do  with  the  impression  made 
upon  the  mind  as  anything  in  the  object  itself;  per- 
haps more.  There  is  somehow  an  immense  and  unde- 
fined background  of  vast  and  unconscionable  energy, 
as  of  earthquakes,  and  ocean  storms,  and  cleft  mount- 
ains, across  which  things  of  beauty  play,  and  to  which 
they  constantly  defer ;  and  when  this  background  is 
wanting,  as  it  is  in  much  current  poetry,  beauty 
sickens  and  dies,  or  at  most  has  only  a  feeble  ex- 
istence. 


BEFORE  BEAUTY.  175 

Nature  does  nothing  merely  for  beauty  ;  beauty  fol- 
lows as  the  inevitable  result;  and  the  final  impression 
of  health  and  finish  which  her  works  make  upon  the 
mind  is  owing  as  much  to  these  things  which  are  not 
technically  called  beautiful,  as  to  those  which  are. 
The  former  give  identity  to  the  latter.  The  one  is 
to  the  other  what  substance  is  to  form,  or  bone  to 
flesh.  The  beauty  of  Nature  includes  all  that  is  called 
beautiful,  as  its  flower ;  and  all  that  is  not  called  beau- 
tiful as  its  stalk  and  roots. 

Indeed,  when  I  go  to  the  woods  or  fields,  or  ascend 
to  the  hill-top,  I  do  not  seem  to  be  gazing  upon  beauty 
at  all,  but  to  be  breathing  it  like  the  air.  I  am  not 
dazzled  or  astonished  ;  I  am  in  no  hurry  to  look  lest 
it  be  gone.  I  would  not  have  the  litter  and  debris  re- 
moved, or  the  banks  trimmed,  or  the  ground  painted. 
What  I  enjoy  is  commensurate  with  the  earth  and  sky 
itself.  It  clings  to  the  rocks  and  trees  ;  it  is  kindred 
to  the  roughness  and  savagery ;  it  rises  from  every 
tangle  and  chasm ;  it  perches  on  the  dry  oak-stubs 
with  the  hawks  and  buzzards  ;  the  crows  shed  it  from 
their  wings  and  weave  it  into  their  nests  of  coarse 
sticks ;  the  fox  barks  it,  the  cattle  low  it,  and  every 
mountain  path  leads  to  its  haunts.  I  am  not  a  spec- 
tator of,  but  a  participator  in  it.  It  is  not  an  adorn- 
ment ;  its  roots  strike  to  the  centre  of  the  earth. 

All  true  beauty  in  Nature  or  in  art  is  like  the  irri- 
descent  hue  of  mother-of-pearl,  which  is  intrinsic  and 
necessary,  being  the  result  of  the  arrangement  of  the 
particles  —  the  flowering  of  the  mechanism  of  the 


Kb  BEFORE  BEAUTY. 

shell ;  or  like  the  beauty  of  health  which  comes  out 
of  and  reaches  back  again  to  the  bones  and  the  diges- 
tion. There  is  no  grace  like  the  grace  of  strength. 
What  sheer  muscular  gripe  and  power  lie  back  of 
the  firm,  delicate  notes  of  the  great  violinist !  "  Wit," 
says  Heine,  —  and  the  same  thing  is  true  of  beauty,  — 
"isolated,  is  worthless.  It  is  only  endurable  when  it 
rests  on  a  solid  basis." 

In  fact,  beauty  as  a  separate  and  distinct  thing  does 
not  exist.  Neither  can  it  be  reached  by  any  sorting 
or  sifting  or  clarifying  process.  It  is  an  experience 
of  the  mind,  and  must  be  preceded  by  the  conditions, 
just  as  light  is  an  experience  of  the  eye,  and  sound 
of  the  ear. 

To  attempt  to  manufacture  beauty  is  as  vain  as  to 
attempt  to  manufacture  truth  ;  and  to  give  it  us  in 
poems,  or  any  form  of  art  without  a  lion  of  some  sort, 
a  lion  of  truth,  or  fitness,  or  power,  is  to  emasculate  it 
and  destroy  its  volition. 

But  current  poetry  is,  for  the  most  part,  an  attempt 
to  do  this  very  thing,  to  give  us  beauty  without  beau- 
ty's antecedents  and  foil.  The  poets  want  to  spare  us 
the  annoyance  of  the  beast.  SinGe  beauty  is  the  chief 
attraction,  why  not  have  this  part  alone,  pure  and 
unadulterated  —  why  not  pluck  the  plumage  from  the 
bird,  the  flower  from  its  stalk,  the  moss  from  the 
rock,  the  shell  from  the  shore,  the  honey-bag  from  the 
bee,  and  thus  have  in  brief  what  pleases  us  ?  Hence, 
with  rare  exceptions,  one  feels  on  opening  the  latest 
book  of  poems,  like  exclaiming,  Well,  here  is  the 


BEFORE   BEAUTY.  177 

beautiful  at  last  divested  of  everything  else,  —  of 
truth,  of  power,  of  utility,  —  and  one  may  add  of 
beauty  too.  It  charms  as  color,  or  flowers,  or  jewels, 
or  perfume,  charms  —  and  that  is  the  end  of  it. 

It  is  ever  present  to  the  true  artist  in  his  attempt 
to  report  Nature,  that  every  object  as  it  stands  in  the 
circuit  of  cause  and  effect  has  a  history  which  involves 
its  surroundings,  and  that  the  depth  of  the  interest 
which  it  awakens  in  us  is  in  proportion  as  its  integrity 
in  this  respect  is  preserved.  In  Nature  we  are  pre- 
pared for  any  opulence  of  color,  or  vegetation,  or 
freak  of  form,  or  display  of  any  kind  by  its  prepon- 
derance of  the  common,  ever-present  feature  of  the 
earth.  The  foil  is  always  at  hand.  In  like  manner 
in  the  master  poems  we  are  never  surfeited  with  mere 
beauty. 

Woe  to  any  artist  who  disengages  beauty  from  the 
wide  background  of  rudeness,  darkness,  and  strength 
—  and  disengages  her  from  absolute  Nature!  The 
mild  and  beneficent  aspects  of  Nature  —  what  gulfs 
and  abysses  of  power  underlie  them !  The  great 
shaggy,  barbaric  earth,  yet  the  summing  up,  the 
plenum  of  all  we  know  or  can  know  of  beauty !  So 
the  orbic  poems  of  the  world  have  a  foundation  as  of 
the  earth  itself,  and  are  beautiful  because  they  are 
something  else  first.  Homer  chose  for  his  ground- 
work War,  clinching,  tearing,  tugging  war ;  in  Dante, 
it  is  Hell  ;  in  Milton,  Satan  and  the  Fall  ;  in 
Shakespeare,  it  is  the  fierce  Feudal  world,  with  its 
towering  and  kingly  personalities;  in  Byron,  it  is 
12 


178  BEFORE   BEAUTY. 

Revolt  and  diabolic  passion.  When  we  get  to  Ten- 
nyson the  lion  is  a  good  deal  tamed,  but  he  is  still 
there  in  the  shape  of  the  proud,  haughty,  and  manly 
Norman,  and  in  many  forms  yet  stimulates  the 
mind. 

The  perception  of  cosmical  beauty  comes  by  a 
vital  original  process.  It  is  in  some  measure  a 
creative  act,  and  those  works  that  rest  upon  it 
make  demands  —  perhaps  extraordinary  ones  —  upon 
the  reader  or  beholder.  We  regard  mere  surface 
glitter,  or  mere  verbal  sweetness,  in  a  mood  entirely 
passive,  and  with  a  pleasure  entirely  profitless.  The 
beauty  of  excellent  stage  scenery  seems  much  more 
obvious  and  easy  of  apprehension  than  the  beauty 
of  trees  and  hills  themselves,  inasmuch  as  the  act  of 
association  in  the  mind  is  much  easier  and  cheaper 
than  the  act  of  original  perception. 

Only  the  greatest  works  in  any  department  afford 
any  explanation  of  this  wonder  we  call  Nature,  or  aid 
the  mind  in  arriving  at  correct  notions  concerning  it. 
To  copy  here  and  there  a  line  or  a  trait  is  no  expla- 
nation ;  but  to  translate  Nature  into  another  language 
—  to  bridge  it  to  us  —  to  repeat  in  some  sort,  the  act 
of  creation  itself — is  the  final  and  crowning  triumph 
of  poetic  art. 

IT. 

After  the  critic  has  enumerated  all  the  stock  qual- 
ities of  the  poet,  as  taste,  fancy,  melody,  etc.,  it  re- 
mains to  be  said  that  unless  there  is  something  in 


BEFORE   BEAUTY.  179 

him  that  is  living  identity,  something  analogous  to  the 
growing,  pushing,  reproducing  forces  of  Nature,  all 
the  rest  in  the  end  pass  for  but  little. 

This  is  perhaps  what  the  German  critic,  Lessing, 
really  means  by  action,  for  true  poems  are  more  like 
deeds,  expressive  of  something  behind,  more  like  acts 
of  heroism  or  devotion,  or  like  personal  character, 
than  like  thoughts,  or  intellections. 

All  the  master  poets  have  in  their  work  an  interior, 
chemical,  assimilative  property,  a  sort  of  gastric  juice 
which  dissolves  thought  and  form,  and  holds  in  vital 
fusion  religions,  times,  races,  and  the  theory  of  their 
own  construction,  naming  up  with  electric  and  defiant 
power  —  power  without  any  admixture  of  resisting 
form,  as  in  a  living  organism." 

There  are  in  Nature  two  types  or  forms,  the  cell 
and  the  crystal.  One  means  the  organic,  the  other 
inorganic ;  one  means  growth,  development,  life  ;  the 
other  means  reaction,  solidification,  rest.  The  hint 
and  model  of  all  creative  works  is  the  cell ;  critical, 
reflective,  and  philosophical  works  are  nearer  akin  to 
the  crystal ;  while  there  is  much  good  literature  that 
is  neither  the  one  nor  the  other  distinctively,  but 
which  in  a  measure  touches  and  includes  both.  But 
crystallic  beauty  or  cut  and  polished  gems  of  thought, 
the  result  of  the  reflex  rather  than  the  direct  action 
of  the  mind,  we  do  not  expect  to  find  in  the  best  poems, 
though  they  may  be  most  prized  by  specially  intel- 
lectual persons.  In  the  immortal  poems  the  solids 
are  very  few,  or  do  not  appear  at  all  as  solids  —  as 


180  BEFORE   BEAUTY. 

lime  and  iron  —  any  more  than  they  do  in  organic 
nature,  in  the  flesh  of  the  peach  or  the  apple.  The 
main  thing  in  every  living  organism  is  the  vital  fluids  ; 
seven  tenths  of  man  is  water ;  and  seven  tenths  of 
Shakespeare  is  passion,  emotion  —  fluid  humanity. 
Out  of  this  arise  his  forms,  as  Venus  arose  out  of  the 
sea,  and  as  man  is  daily  built  up  out  of  the  liquids  of 
the  body.  We  cannot  taste,  much  less  assimilate,  a 
solid  until  it  becomes  a  liquid  ;  and  your  great  idea, 
your  sermon  or  moral,  lies  upon  your  poem  a  dead, 
cumbrous  mass  unless  there  is  adequate  heat  and  sol- 
vent, emotional  power.  Herein  I  think  Wordsworth's 
"  Excursion  "  fails  as  a  poem.  It  has  too  much  solid 
matter.  It  is  an  over-freighted  bark  that  does  not  ride 
the  waves  buoyantly  and  life-like  ;  far  less  so  than 
Tennyson's  "  In  Memoriam,"  which  is  just  as  truly  a 
philosophical  poem  as  the  "  Excursion."  (Words- 
worth is  the  fresher  poet ;  his  poems  seem  really  to 
have  been  written  in  the  open  air,  and  to  have  been 
brought  directly  under  the  oxygenating  influence  of 
out-door  nature ;  while  in  Tennyson  this  influence 
seems  tempered  or  farther  removed.) 

The  physical  cosmos  itself  is  not  a  thought,  but  an 
act.  Natural  objects  do  not  affect  us  like  well  wrought 
specimens  or  finished  handicraft,  which  have  nothing 
to  follow,  but  as  living,  procreating  energy.  Nature 
is  perpetual  transition.  Everything  passes  and  presses 
on ;  there  is  no  pause,  no  completion,  no  explanation. 
To  produce  and  multiply  endlessly,  without  ever  reach- 
ing the  last  possibility  of  excellence,  and  without  com- 
mitting herself  to  any  end,  is  the  law  of  Nature. 


BEFORE   BEAUTY.  181 

These  considerations  bring  us  very  near  the  essen- 
tial difference  between  prose  and  poetry,  or  rather 
between  the  poetic  and  the  didactic  treatment  of  a 
subject.  The  essence  of  creative  art  is  always  the 
same ;  namely,  interior  movement  and  fusion  ;  while 
the  method  of  the  didactic  or  prosaic  treatment  is 
fixity,  limitation.  The  latter  must  formulate  and 
define  ;  but  the  principle  of  the  former  is  to  flow,  to 
suffuse,  to  mount,  to  escape.  We  can  conceive  of  life 
only  as  something  constantly  becoming.  It  plays  for- 
ever on  the  verge.  It  is  never  in  loco,  but  always  in 
transitu.  Arrest  the  wind,  and  it  is  no  longer  the 
wind;  close  your  hands  upon  the  light,  and  behold, 
it  is  gone. 

The  antithesis  of  art  in  method  is  science,  as  Cole- 
ridge has  intimated.  As  the  latter  aims  at  the  par- 
ticular, so  the  former  aims  at  the  universal.  One 
would  have  truth  of  detail,  the  other  truth  of  ensemble* 
The  method  of  science  may  be  symbolized  by  the 
straight  line,  that  of  art  by  the  curve.  The  results 
of  science,  relatively  to  its  aim,  must  be  parts  and 
pieces ;  while  art  must  give  the  whole  in  every  act ; 
not  quantitively  of  course,  but  qualitively  —  by  the 
integrity  of  the  spirit  in  which  it  works. 

The  Greek  mind  will  always  be  the  type  of  the 
artist  mind,  mainly  because  of  its  practical  bent,  its 
healthful  objectivity.  The  Greek  never  looked  in- 
ward, but  outward.  Criticism  and  speculation  were 
foreign  to  him.  His  head  shows  a  very  marked  pre- 
dominance of  the  motor  and  perceptive  principle  over 


182  BEFORE   BEAUTY. 

the  reflective.  The  expression  of  the  face  is  never 
what  we  call  intellectual  or  thoughtful,  but  command- 
ing. His  gods  are  not  philosophers,  but  delight  in 
deeds,  justice,  rulership. 

Among  the  differences  between  the  modern  and 
the  classical  aesthetic  mind,  is  the  greater  precision 
and  definiteness  of  the  latter.  The  modern  genius 
is  Gothic,  and  demands  in  art  a  certain  vagueness 
and  spirituality  like  that  of  music,  refusing  to  be 
grasped  and  formulated.  Hence,  for  us  (and  this  is 
undoubtedly  an  improvement)  there  must  always  be 
something  about  a  poem,  or  any  work  of  art,  besides 
the  evident  intellect  or  plot  of  it,  or  what  is  on  its 
surface,  or  what  it  tells.  This  something  is  the  In- 
visible, the  Undefined,  almost  Unexpressed,  and  is 
perhaps  the  best  part  of  any  work  of  art,  as  it  is  of 
a  noble  Personality.  To  amuse,  to  exhibit  culture, 
to  formulate  the  aesthetic,  or  even  to  excite  the  emo- 
tions, is  by  no  means  all  —  is  not  even  the  deepest 
part.  Beside  these  and  inclosing  all,  is  the  general 
impalpable  effect,  like  a  good  air,  or  the  subtle  pres- 
ence of  good  spirits,  wordless  but  more  potent  far 
than  words.  As  in  the  superbest  person,  it  is  not 
merely  what  he  or  she  says,  or  knows,  or  shows,  or 
even  how  they  behave,  but  in  the  silent  qualities  like 
gravitation  that  insensibly  but  resistlessly  hold  us; 
so  in  a  good  Poem,  or  any  other  expression  of  art. 


EMERSON, 


EMERSON. 


"Wherein  the  race  has  so  far  lost  and  gained  in 
being  transplanted  from  Europe  to  the  New  England 
soil  and  climate,  is  well  illustrated  by  the  writings  of 
Emerson.  There  is  greater  refinement  and  sublima- 
tion of  thought,  greater  clearness  and  sharpness  of 
outline,  greater  audacity  of  statement,  but,  on  the 
other  hand,  there  is  a  loss  of  bulk,  of  unction,  of  ad- 
ipose tissue,  and  shall  we  say  of  power  ? 

Emerson  is  undoubtedly  a  master  on  the  New 
England  scale  —  such  a  master  as  the  land  and  race 
are  capable  of  producing.  He  stands  out  clear  and 
undeniable.  The  national  type,  as  illustrated  by  that 
section  of  the  country,  is  the  purest  and  strongest  in 
him  of  any  yet.  He  can  never  suffer  eclipse.  Com- 
pared with  the  English  or  German  master,  he  is  un- 
doubtedly deficient  in  viscera,  in  moral  and  intellect- 
ual stomach  ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  he  is  of  a  fibre 
and  quality  hard  to  match  in  any  age  or  land.  From 
first  to  last  he  strikes  one  as  something  extremely 
pure  and  compact,  like  a  nut  or  an  egg.  Great  mat- 
ters and  tendencies  lie  folded  in  him,  or  rather  are 
summarized  in  his  pages.     He  writes  short  but  preg- 


186  EMERSON. 

nant  chapters  on  great  themes,  as  in  his  "  English 
Traits,"  a  book  like  rich  preserves  put  up  pound  for 
pound,  a  pound  of  Emerson  to  every  pound  of  John 
Bull.  His  chapter  on  Swedenborg  in  "  Representa- 
tive Men "  is  a  good  sample  of  his  power  to  abbrevi- 
ate and  restate  with  added  force.  His  mind  acts  like 
a  sun-lens  in  gathering  the  cold  pale  beams  of  that 
luminary  to  a  focus  which  warms  and  stimulates  the 
reader  in  a  surprising  manner.  The  gist  of  the  whole 
matter  is  here  ;  and  how  much  weariness  and  dullness 
and  plodding  is  left  out ! 

In  fact,  Emerson  is  an  essence,  a  condensation; 
more  so,  perhaps,  than  any  other  man  who  has  ap- 
peared in  literature.  Nowhere  else  is  there  such  a 
preponderance  of  pure  statement,  of  the  very  attar  of 
thought  over  the  bulkier,  circumstantial,  qualifying,  or 
secondary  elements.  He  gives  us  net  results.  He  is 
like  those  strong  artificial  fertilizers.  A  pinch  of  him 
is  equivalent  to  a  page  or  two  of  Johnson,  and  he  is 
pitched  many  degrees  higher  as  an  essayist  than  even 
Bacon.  He  has  had  an  immediate  stimulating  effect 
upon  all  the  best  minds  of  the  country  ;  how  deep 
or  lasting  this  influence  will  be  remains  to  be  seen. 

This  point  and  brevity  has  its  convenience  and 
value  especially  in  certain  fields  of  literature.  I  by 
no  means  would  wish  to  water  Emerson  ;  yet  it  will 
not  do  to  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  mass  and  inertia 
are  indispensable  to  the  creator.  Considering  him 
as  Poet  alone,  I  have  no  doubt  of  his  irremediable 
deficiency   here.      You   canot   have   broad,   massive 


EMERSON.  187 

effect,  deep  lights  and  shade,  or  a  torrent  of  power, 
with  such  extreme  refinement  and  condensation.  The 
superphosphates  cannot  take  the  place  of  the  coarser, 
bulkier  fertilizers.  Especially  in  poetry  do  we  re- 
quire pure  thought  to  be  well  diluted  with  the  human, 
emotional  qualities.  In  the  writing  most  precious  to 
the  race,  how  little  is  definition  and  intellectual  for- 
mula, and  how  much  is  impulse,  emotion,  will-char- 
acter, blood,  chyle,  etc.  We  must  have  liquids  and 
gases  and  solvents.  We  perhaps  get  more  of  them 
in  Carlyle.  Emerson's  page  has  more  serene  astral 
beauty  than  Carlyle's,  but  not  that  intense  blast-fur- 
nace heat  that  melts  down  the  most  obdurate  facts 
and  characters  into  something  plastic  and  poetical. 
Emerson's  ideal  is  always  the  scholar,  the  man  of 
books  and  ready  wit ;  Carlyle's  hero  is  a  riding  or 
striding  ruler,  or  a  master  worker  in  some  active  field. 
The  antique  mind  no  doubt  affords  the  true  type 
of  health  and  wholeness  in  this  respect.  The  Greek 
could  see,  and  feel,  and  paint,  and  carve,  and  speak, 
nothing  but  emotional  man.  In  nature  he  saw  noth- 
ing but  personality  —  nothing  but  human  or  super- 
human qualities  ;  to  him  the  elements  all  took  the 
human  shape.  Of  that  vague,  spiritual,  abstract 
something  which  we  call  Nature  he  had  no  concep- 
tion. He  had  no  sentiment,  properly  speaking,  but 
impulse  and  will-power.  And  the  master  minds  of 
the  world,  in  proportion  to  their  strength,  their  spinal 
strength,  have  approximated  to  this  type.  Dante, 
Angelo,    Shakespeare,  Byron,   Goethe    saw  mainly 


188  EMERSON. 

man,  and  him  not  abstractly,  but  concretely.  And 
this  is  the  charm  of  Burns  and  the  glory  of  Scott. 
Carlyle  has  written  the  best  histories  and  biographies 
of  modern  times,  because  he  sees  man  with  such  fierce 
and  steadfast  eyes.  Emerson  sees  him  also,  but  he  is 
not  interested  in  him  as  a  man,  but  mainly  as  a  spirit, 
as  a  demigod,  or  as  a  wit  or  philosopher. 

Emerson's  quality  has  changed  a  good  deal  in  his 
later  writings.  His  corn  is  no  longer  in  the  milk  ;  it 
has  grown  hard,  and  we  that  read  have  grown  hard 
too.  He  has  now  ceased  to  be  an  expansive,  revolu- 
tionary force,  but  he  has  not  ceased  to  be  a  writer 
of  extraordinary  gripe  and  unexpected  resources  of 
statement.  His  startling  piece  of  advice,  "  Hitch  your 
wagon  to  a  star,"  is  typical  of  the  man,  as  combining 
the  most  unlike  and  widely  separate  qualities.  Be- 
cause, not  less  marked  than  his  idealism  and  mysti- 
cism is  his  shrewd  common  sense,  his  practical  bent, 
his  definiteness  —  in  fact,  the  sharp  New  England 
mould  in  which  he  is  cast.  He  is  the  master  Yankee, 
the  centennial  flower  of  that  thrifty  and  peculiar  stock. 
More  especially  in  his  later  writings  and  speakings 
do  we  see  the  native  New  England  traits  — the  alert- 
ness, eagerness,  inquisitiveness,  thrift,  dryness,  arch- 
ness, caution,  the  nervous  energy  as  distinguished  from 
the  old  English  unction  and  vascular  force.  How  he 
husbands  himself — what  prudence,  what  economy, 
always  spending  up,  as  he  says,  and  not  down.  How 
alert,  how  attentive  ;  what  an  inquisitor;  always  ready 
with  some  test   question,  with  some  fact  or  idea  to 


EMERSON.  189 

match  or  verify,  ever  on  the  lookout  for  some  choice 
bit  of  adventure  or  information,  or  some  anecdote  that 
has  pith  and  point !  No  tyro  basks  and  takes  his  ease 
in  his  presence,  but  is  instantly  put  on  trial  and  must 
answer  or  be  disgraced.  He  strikes  at  an  idea  like 
a  falcon  at  a  bird.  His  great  fear  seems  to  be  lest 
there  be  some  fact  or  point  worth  knowing  that  will 
escape  him.  He  is  a  close-browed  miser  of  the 
scholar's  gains.  He  turns  all  values  into  intellectual 
coin.  Every  book  or  person  or  experience  is  an  in- 
vestment that  Will  or  will  not  warrant  a  good  return 
in  ideas.  He  goes  to  the  Radical  Club,  or  to  the 
literary  gathering,  and  listens  with  the  closest  atten- 
tion to  every  word  that  is  said,  in  hope  that  some- 
thing will  be  said,  some  word  dropped,  that  has  the 
ring  of  the  true  metal.  Apparently  he  does  not  per- 
mit himself  a  moment's  indifference  or  inattention. 
His  own  pride  is  always  to  have  the  ready  change,  to 
speak  the  exact  and  proper  word,  to  give  to  every 
occasion  the  dignity  of  wise  speech.  You  are  bar- 
tered with  for  your  best.  There  is  no  profit  in  life 
but  in  the  interchange  of  ideas,  and  the  chief  success 
is  to  have  a  head  well  filled  with  them.  Hard  cash 
at  that ;  no  paper  promises  satisfy  him ;  he  loves  the 
clink  and  glint  of  the  real  coin. 

His  earlier  writings  were  more  flowing  and  sugges- 
tive and  had  reference  to  larger  problems  ;  but  now 
everything  has  got  weighed  and  stamped  and  con- 
verted into  the  medium  of  wise  and  scholarly  conver- 
sation.    It  is  of  great  value  ;  these  later  essays  are  so 


190  EMERSON. 

many  bags  of  genuine  coin,  which  it  has  taken  a  life- 
time to  hoard ;  not  all  gold,  but  all  good,  and  the  fruit 
of  wise  industry  and  economy. 

I  know  of  no  other  writing  that  yields  the  reader 
so  many  strongly  stamped  medallion-like  sayings  and 
distinctions.  There  is  a  perpetual  refining  and  re- 
coining  of  the  current  wisdom  of  life  and  conversa- 
tion. It  is  the  old  gold  or  silver  or  copper,  but  how 
bright  and  new  it  looks  in  his  pages.  Emerson  loves 
'facts,  things,  objects,  as  the  workman  his  tools.  He 
makes  everything  serve.  The  stress  of  expression  is 
so  great  that  he  bends  the  most  obdurate  element  to 
his  purpose ;  as  the  bird,  under  her  keen  necessity, 
weaves  the  most  contrary  and  diverse  materials  into 
her  nest.  He  seems  to  like  best  material  that  is  a 
little  refractory  ;  it  makes  his  page  more  piquant  and 
stimulating.  Within  certain  limits  he  loves  rough- 
ness, but  not  to  the  expense  of  harmony.  He  has  a 
wonderful  hardiness  and  push.  Where  else  in  litera- 
ture is  there  a  mind,  moving  in  so  rare  a  medium, 
that  gives  one  such  a  sense  of  tangible  resistance  and 
force  ?  It  is  a  principle  in  mechanics  that  velocity 
is  twice  as  great  as  mass :  double  your  speed,  and  you 
double  your  heat,  though  you  halve  your  weight.  In 
like  manner  this  body  we  are  considering  is  not  the 
largest,  but  its  speed  is  great,  and  the  intensity  of  its 
impact  with  objects  and  experience  is  almost  without 
parallel.  Everything  about  a  man  like  Emerson  is 
important.  I  find  his  phrenology  and  physiognomy 
more  than  ordinarily  typical  and  suggestive.     Look 


EMERSON.  191 

at  his  picture  there  —  large  strong  features  on  a  small 
face  and  head  —  no  blank  spaces ;  all  given  up  to 
expression ;  a  high  predaceous  nose,  a  sinewy  brow, 
a  massive,  benevolent  chin.  In  most  men  there  is 
more  face  than  feature,  but  here  is  a  vast  deal  more 
feature  than  face,  and  a  corresponding  alertness  and 
emphasis  of  character.  Indeed,  the  man  is  made  after 
this  fashion.  He  is  all  type  ;  his  expression  is  tran- 
scendent. His  mind  has  the  hand's  pronounced  anat- 
omy, its  cords  and  sinews  and  multiform  articulations 
and  processes,  its  opposing  and  coordinating  power. 
If  his  brain  is  small,  its  texture  is  fine,  and  its  convo- 
lutions deep.  There  have  been  broader  and  more 
catholic  natures,  but  few  so  towering  and  audacious 
in  expression  and  so  rich  in  characteristic  traits. 
Every  scrap  and  shred  of  him  is  important  and  re- 
lated. Like  the  strongly  aromatic  herbs  and  simples, 
—  sage,  mint,  wintergreen,  sassafras,  —  the  least  part 
carries  the  flavor  of  the  whole.  Is  there  one  in- 
different, or  equivocal  or  unsympathizing  drop  of 
blood  in  him?  Where  he  is  at  all  he  is  entirely  — 
nothing  extemporaneous  ;  his  most  casual  word  seems 
to  have  laid  in  pickle  a  long  time,  and  is  saturated 
through  and  through  with  the  Emersonian  brine.  In- 
deed, so  pungent  and  penetrating  is  his  quality,  that 
even  his  quotations  seem  more  than  half  his  own. 

He  is  a  man  who  occupies  every  inch  of  his  right- 
ful territory  ;  he  is  there  in  proper  person  to  the  far- 
thest bound.  Not  every  man  is  himself  and  his  best 
self  at  all  times,  and  to  his  finger  points.    Many  great 


192  EMERSON. 

characters,  perhaps  the  greatest,  have  more  or  less 
neutral  or  waste  ground.  You  must  penetrate  a  dis- 
tance before  you  reach  the  real  quick.  Or  there  is  a 
good  wide  margin  of  the  commonplace  which  is  sure 
to  put  them  on  good  terms  .with  the  mass  of  their 
fellow  citizens.  And  one  would  think  Emerson  could 
afford  to  relax  a  little  ;  that  he  had  earned  the  right 
to  a  dull  page  or  two  now  and  then.  The  second  best 
or  third  best  word  sometimes  would  make  us  appre- 
ciate his  first  best  all  the  more.  Even  his  god-father 
Plato  nods  occasionally,  but  Emerson's  good  breeding 
will  not  for  a  moment  permit  such  a  slight  to  the 
reader. 

Emerson's  peculiar  quality  is  very  subtle,  but  very 
sharp,  and  firm,  and  unmistakable.  It  is  not  analo- 
gous to  the  commoner,  slower  going  elements,  as  heat, 
air,  fire,  water,  etc.,  but  is  nearer  akin  to  that  elusive 
but  potent  something  we  call  electricity.  It  is  ab- 
rupt, freaky,  unexpected,  and  always  communicates  a 
little  wholesome  shock.  It  darts  this  way  and  that, 
and  connects  the  far  and  the  near  in  every  line. 
There  is  always  a  leaping  thread  of  light,  and  there 
is  always  a  kind  of  answering  peal  or  percussion. 
With  what  quickness  and  suddenness  extremes  are 
brought  together !  The  reader  is  never  prepared  for 
what  is  to  come  next ;  the  spark  will  most  likely  leap 
from  some  source  or  fact  least  thought  of.  His  page 
seldom  glows  and  burns,  but  there  is  a  never  ceasing 
crackling  and  discharge  of  moral  and  intellectual  force 
into  the  mind. 


EMERSON.  193 

His  chief  weapon,  and  one  that  he  never  lays  down, 
is  identical  with  that  of  the  great  wits ;  namely,  sur- 
prise. The  point  of  his  remark  or  idea  is  always 
sprung  upon  the  reader,  never  quietly  laid  before 
him.  He  has  a  mortal  dread  of  tameness  and  flat- 
ness, and  would  make  the  very  water  we  drink  bite 
the  tongue. 

He  has  been  from  the  first  a  speaker  and  lecturer, 
and  his  style  has  been  largely  modeled  according  to 
the  demand  of  those  sharp,  heady  New  England  au- 
diences for  ceaseless  intellectual  friction  and  chafing. 
Heuce  every  sentence  is  braided  hard,  and  more  or 
less  knotted,  and  though  of  silk,  makes  the  mind  tin- 
gle. He  startles  by  overstatement,  by  understate- 
ment, by  paradox,  by  antithesis,  and  by  synthesis. 
Into  every  sentence  enters  the  unexpected  —  the 
congruous  leaping  from  the  incongruous,  the  high 
coming  down,  the  low  springing  up,  likeness,  relation 
suddenly  coming  into  view  where  before  was  only 
difference  or  antagonism.  How  he  delights  to  bring 
the  reader  up  with  a  short  turn,  to  impale  him  on 
a  knotty  point,  to  explode  one  of  his  verbal  bomb- 
shells under  his  very  nose.  Yet  there  is  no  trickery 
or  rhetorical  legerdemain.  His  heroic  fibre  always 
saves  him. 

The  language  in  which  Taine  describes  Bacon  ap- 
plies with  even  more  force  to.  Emerson  :  — 

"  Bacon,"  he  says,  "  is  a  producer  of  conceptions 
and  of  sentences.  The  matter  being  explored,  he 
says  to  us  :  '  Such  it  is  ;  touch  it  not  on  that  side  ;  it 
13 


194  EMERSON. 

must  be  approached  from  the  other.'  Nothing  more ; 
no  proof,  no  effort  to  convince  ;  he  affirms,  and  nothing 
more ;  he  has  thought  in  the  manner  of  artists  and 
poets,  and  he  speaks  after  the  manner  of  prophets  and 
seers.  ;  Cogita  el  visa '  —  this  title  of  one  of  his  books 
might  be  the  title  of  all.     His  process  is  that  of  the 

creators ;  it  is  intuition,  not  reasoning There 

is  nothing  more  hazardous,  more  like  fantasy,  than  this 
mode  of  thought  when  it  is  not  checked  by  natural 
and  good  strong  common  sense.  This  common  sense, 
which  is  a  kind  of  natural  divination,  the  stable  equi- 
librium of  an-  intellect  always  gravitating  to  the  true, 
like  the  needle  to  the  north  pole,  Bacon  possesses  in 
the  highest  degree.  He  has  a  preeminently  practical, 
even  an  utilitarian  mind." 

It  is  significant,  and  is  indeed  the  hidden  seed  or 
root,  out  of  which  comes  the  explanation  of  much, 
if  not  the  main  part  of  his  life  and  writings,  that 
Emerson  comes  of  a  long  line  of  clergymen  ;  that  the 
blood  in  his  veins  has  been  teaching,  and  preaching, 
and  thinking  and  growing  austere,  these  many  gener- 
ations. One  wonders  that  it  is  still  so  bounding  and 
strong,  so  red  with  iron  and  quick  with  oxygen.  But 
in  him  seems  to  be  illustrated  one  of  those  rare  cases 
in  the  genealogy  of  families  where  the  best  is  carried 
forward  each  time  and  steadily  recruited  and  intensi- 
fied. It  does  not  seem  possible  for  any  man  to  be- 
come just  what  Emerson  is  from  the  stump,  though 
perhaps  great  men  have  been  the  fruit  of  one  gener- 
ation ;  but  there  is  a  quality  in  him,  an  aroma  of  fine 


EMERSON.  195 

manners,  a  propriety,  a  chivalry  in  the  blood  that 
dates  back,  and  has  been  refined  and  transmitted  many 
times.  Power  is  born  with  a  man,  and  is  always 
first  hand,  but  culture,  genius,  noble  instincts,  gentle 
manners,  etc.,  or  the  easy  capacity  for  these  things, 
may  be,  and  to  a  greater  or  lesser  extent  are,  the 
contribution  of  the  past.  Emerson's  culture  is  radical 
and  ante-natal,  and  never  fails  him.  The  virtues  of 
all  those  New  England  ministers  and  all  those  tomes 
of  sermons  are  in  this  casket.  One  fears  sometimes 
that  he  has  been  too  much  clarified,  or  that  there  is 
not  enough  savage  grace  or  original  viciousness  and 
grit  in  him  to  save  him.  How  he  hates  the  royster- 
ers,  and  all  the  rank,  turbulent,  human  passions,  and 
is  chilled  by  the  thought  that  perhaps  after  all  Shake- 
speare led  a  vulgar  life  ! 

When  Tyndall  was  here  he  showed  us  how  the 
dark,  coarse,  invisible  heat  rays  could  be  strained  out 
of  the  spectrum ;  or  in  other  words,  that  every  solar 
beam  was  weighed  with  a  vast,  nether,  invisible  side, 
which  made  it  a  lever  of  tremendous  power  in  organic 
nature.  After  some  such  analogy  one  sees  how  the 
highest  order  of  power  in  the  intellectual  world  draws 
upon  and  is  nourished  by  those  rude,  primitive,  bar- 
baric human  qualities  that  our  culture  and  pietism 
tend  to  cut  off  and  strain  out.  Our  culture  has  its 
eye  on  the  other  end  of  the  spectrum,  where  the  fine 
violet  and  indigo  rays  are ;  but  all  the  lifting,  round- 
ing, fructifying  powers  of  the  system  are  in  the  coarse, 
dark  rays  —  the  black  devil  —  at  the  base.    The  angel 


196  EMERSON. 

of  light  is  yoked  with  the  demon  of  darkness,  and  the 
pair  create  and  sustain  the  world. 

In  rare  souls  like  Emerson,  the  fruit  of  extreme 
culture,  it  is  inevitable  that  at  least  some  of  the  heat 
rays  should  be  lost,  and  we  miss  them  especially  when 
we  contrast  him  with  the  elder  masters.  The  elder 
masters  did  not  seem  to  get  rid  of  the  coarse  or  vul- 
gar in  human  life,  but  royally  accepted  it,  and  struck 
their  roots  into  it,  and  drew  from  it  sustenance  and 
power;  but  there  is  an  ever  present  suspicion  that 
Emerson  prefers  the  saints  to  the  sinners ;  prefers  the 
prophets  and  seers  to  Homer,  Shakespeare,  and  Dante. 
Indeed  it  is  to  be  distinctly  stated  and  emphasized, 
that  Emerson  is  essentially  a  priest,  and  that  the  key 
to  all  he  has  said  and  written  is  to  be  found  in  the 
fact  that  his  point  of  view  is  not  that  of  the  acceptor, 
the  creator  —  Shakespeare's  point  of  view  —  but  that 
of  the  refiner  and  selector  —  the  priests'  point  of  view. 
He  described  his  own  state  rather  than  that  of  man- 
kind when  he  said,  "  the  human  mind  stands  ever  in 
perplexity,  demanding  intellect,  demanding  sanctity, 
impatient  equally  of  each  without  the  other." 

Much  surprise  has  been  expressed  in  literary  cir- 
cles in  this  country  that  Emerson  has  not  followed  up 
his  first  off-hand  indorsement  of  Walt  Whitman  with 
fuller  and  more  deliberate  approval  of  that  poet,  but 
has  rather  taken  the  opposite  tack.  But  the  wonder 
is  that  he  should  have  been  carried  off  his  feet  at  all 
in  the  manner  he  was ;  and  it  must  have  been  no  or- 
dinary breeze  that  did  it.     Emerson  shares  with  his 


EMERSON.  197 

contemporaries  the  vast  preponderance  of  the  critical 
and  discerning  intellect  over  the  fervid,  manly  quali- 
ties and  faith.  His  power  of  statement  is  enormous  ; 
his  scope  of  being  is  not  enormous.  The  prayer  he 
uttered  many  years  ago  for  a  poet  of  the  modern, 
one  who  could  see  in  the  gigantic  materialism  of  the 
times  the  carnival  of  the  same  deities  we  so  much 
admire  in  Greece  and  Rome,  etc.,  seems  to  many  to 
have  even  been  explicitly  answered  in  Whitman ;  but 
Emerson  is  balked  by  the  cloud  of  materials,  the  din 
and  dust  of  action,  and  the  moving  armies,  in  which 
the  god  comes  enveloped. 

But  Emerson  has  his  difficulties  with  all  the  poets. 
Homer  is  too  literal,  Milton  too  literary,  and  there 
is  too  much  of  the  whooping  savage  in  Whitman, 
lie  seems  to  think  the  real  poet  is  yet  to  appear ;  a 
poet  on  new  terms,  the  reconciler,  the  poet-priest  — 
one  who  shall  unite  the  whiteness  and  purity  of  the 
saint  with  the  power  and  unction  of  the  sinner ;  one 
who  shall  bridge  the  chasm  between  Shakespeare  and 
St.  John.  For  when  our  Emerson  gets  on  his  highest 
horse,  which  he  does  only  on  two  or  three  occasions, 
he  finds  Shakespeare  only  a  half  man,  and  that  it 
would  take  Plato  and  Menu  and  Moses  and  Jesus  to 
complete  him.  Shakespeare,  he  says,  rested  with  the 
symbol,  with  the  festal  beauty  of  the  world,  and  did 
not  take  the  final  step,  and  explore  the  essence  of 
things,  and  ask,  "  Whence  ?  What  and  Whither  ?  " 
He  was  not  wise  for  himself ;  he  did  not  lead  a  beau- 
tiful, saintly  life,  but  ate,  and  drank,  and  reveled,  and 


198  EMERSON. 

affiliated  with  all  manner  of  persons,  and  quaffed  the 
cup  of  life  with  gusto  and  relish.  The  elect,  spotless 
souls  will  always  look  upon  the  heat  and  unconscious 
optimism  of  the  great  poet  with  deep  regret.  But  if 
man  would  not  become  emasculated,  if  human  life  is 
to  continue,  we  must  cherish  the  coarse  as  well  as  the 
fine,  the  root  as  well  as  the  top  and  flower.  The 
poet-priest  in  the  Emersonian  sense  has  never  yet 
appeared,  and  what  reason  have  we  to  expect  him  ? 
The  poet  means  life,  the  whole  of  life  —  all  your 
ethics  and  philosophies,  and  essences  and  reason  of 
things,  in  vital  play  and  fusion,  clothed  with  form  and 
color,  and  throbbing  with  passion ;  the  priest  means 
a  part,  a  thought,  a  precept ;  he  means  suppression, 
expurgation,  death.  To  have  gone  farther  than  Shake- 
speare would  have  been  to  cease  to  be  a  poet  and  be- 
come a  mystic  or  seer. 

Yet  it  would  be  absurd  to  say,  as  a  leading  British 
literary  journal  recently  did,  that  Emerson  is  not  a 
poet.  He  is  one  kind  of  a  poet.  He  has  written 
plenty  of  poems  that  are  as  melodious  as  the  hum 
of  a  wild  bee  in  the  air  —  chords  of  wild  asolian 
music. 

Undoubtedly  his  is,  on  the  whole  a  bloodless  kind 
of  poetry.  It  suggests  the  pale  gray  matter  of  the 
cerebrum  rather  than  flesh  aud  blood.  Mr.  Wm. 
Rossetti  has  made  a  suggestive  remark  about  him. 
He  is  not  so  essentially  a  poet,  says  this  critic,  as  he 
is  a  Druid  that  wanders  among  the  bards  and  strikes 
the  harp  with  even  more  than  bardic  stress. 


EMERSON.  199 

Not  in  the  poetry  of  any  of  his  contemporaries  is 
there  such  a  burden  of  the  mystery  of  things  or  such 
round  wind-harp  tones,  lines  so  tense  and  resonant, 
and  blown  upon  by  a  breeze  from  the  highest  heaven 
of  thought.  In  certain  respects  he  has  gone  beyond 
any  other.  He  has  gone  beyond  the  symbol  to  the 
thing  signified.  He  has  emptied  poetic  forms  of  their 
meaning  and  made  poetry  of  that.  He  would  fain 
cut  the  world  up  into  stars  to  shine  in  the  intellect- 
ual firmament.  He  is  more  and  he  is  less  than  the 
best. 

He  stands  among  other  poets  like  a  pine-tree  amid 
a  forest  of  oak  and  maple.  He  seems  to  belong  to 
another  race,  and  to  other  climes  and  conditions. 
He  is  great  in  one  direction,  up ;  no  dancing  leaves, 
but  rapt  needles ;  never  abandonment,  never  a  tossing 
and  careering,  never  an  avalanche  of  emotion  ;  the 
same  in  sun  and  snow,  scattering  his  cones,  and  with 
night  and  obscurity  amid  his  branches.  He  is  moral 
first  and  last,  and  it  is  through  his  impassioned  and 
poetic  treatment  of  the  moral  law  that  he  gains  such 
an  ascendency  over  his  reader.  He  says,  as  for  other 
things  he  makes  poetry  of  them,  but  the  moral  law 
makes  poetry  of  him.  He  sees  in  the  world  only  the 
ethical,  but  he  sees  it  through  the  aesthetic  faculty. 
Hence  his  page  has  the  double  charm  of  the  beautiful 
and  the  good. 


200  EMERSON. 


II. 


One  of  the  penalties  Emerson  pays  for  his  sharp 
decision,  his  mental  pertinence  and  resistance,  is  the 
curtailment  of  his  field  of  vision  and  enjoyment.  He 
is  one  of  those  men  whom  the  gods  drive  with  blind- 
ers on,  so  that  they  see  fiercely  in  only  a  few  direc- 
tions. Supreme  lover  as  he  is  of  poetry,  —  Herrick's 
poetry,  —  yet  from  the  whole  domain  of  what  may  be 
called  emotional  poetry,  the  poetry  of  fluid  human- 
ity, tallied  by  music,  he  seems  to  be  shut  out.  This 
may  be  seen  by  his  reference  to  Shelley  in  his  last 
book,  "  Letters  and  Social  Aims,"  and  by  his  prefer- 
ence of  the  metaphysical  poet  throughout  his  writ- 
ings. "Wordsworth's  famous  "  Ode  "  is,  he  says,  the 
high-water  mark  of  English  literature.  What  he 
seems  to  value  most  in  Shakespeare  is  the  marvelous 
wit,  the  pregnant  sayings.  He  finds  no  poet  in 
France,  and  in  his  "  English  Traits  "  credits  Tenny- 
son with  little  but  melody  and  color.  (In  our  last 
readings,  do  we  not  surely  come  to  feel  the  manly  and 
robust  fibre  beneath  Tennyson's  silken  vestments?) 
He  demands  of  poetry  that  it  be  a  kind  of  spiritual 
manna,  and  is  at  last  forced  to  confess  that  there  are 
no  poets,  and  that  when  such  angels  do  appear  Homer 
and  Milton  will  be  tin  pans. 

One  feels  that  this  will  not  do,  and  that  health,  and 
wholeness,  and  the  well-being  of  man,  are  more  in  the 
keeping  of  Shakespeare  than  in  the  hands  of  Zoroas- 
ter or  any  of  the  saints.  I  doubt  if  that  rarefied  air 
will  make  good  red  blood  and  plenty  of  it. 


EMERSON.  201 

But  Emerson  makes  his  point  plain,  and  is  not 
indebted  to  any  of  his  teachers  for  it.  It  is  the  burden 
of  all  he  writes  upon  the  subject.  The  long  discourse 
that  opens  his  last  volume  has  numerous  sub-headings 
—  as  "  Poetry,"  "  Imagination,"  "  Creation,"  "  Mor- 
als," and  "  Transcendency ; "  but  it  is  all  a  plea  for 
transcendency.  I  am  reminded  of  the  story  of  an  old 
Indian  chief  who  was  invited  to  some  great  dinner 
where  the  first  course  was  "  succotash."  When  the 
second  course  was  ready  the  old  Indian  said  he  would 
have  a  little  more  succotash,  and  when  the  third  was 
ready  he  called  for  more  succotash,  and  so  with  the 
fourth  and  fifth,  and  on  to  the  end.  In  like  manner 
Emerson  will  have  nothing  but  the  "  spiritual  law  " 
in  poetry,  and  he  has  an  enormous  appetite  for  that. 
Let  him  have  it,  but  why  should  he  be  so  sure  that 
mankind  all  want  succotash  ?  Mankind  finally  comes 
to  care  little  for  what  any  poet  has  to  say,  but  only 
for  what  he  has  to  sing.  We  want  the  pearl  of 
thought  dissolved  in  the  wine  of  life.  How  much 
better  are  sound  bones  and  a  good  digestion  in  poetry 
than  all  the  philosophy  and  transcendentalism  in  the 
world. 

What  one  comes  at  last  to  want  is  power,  mastery ; 
and  whether  it  be  mastery  over  the  subtleties  of  the 
intellect  as  in  Emerson  himself,  or  over  the  passions 
and  the  springs  of  action,  as  in  Shakespeare,  or  over 
our  terrors  and  the  awful  hobgoblins  of  hell  and 
Satan,  as  in  Dante,  or  over  vast  masses  and  spaces  of 
Nature  and  the  abysms  of  aboriginal  man,  as  in  Walt 


202  EMERSON. 

Whitman  —  what  matters  it  ?  Are  we  not  refreshed 
by  all  ?  There  is  one  mastery  in  Burns,  another  in 
Byron,  another  in  Rabelais,  and  in  Victor  Hugo,  and 
in  Tennyson,  and  though  the  critic  has  his  prefer- 
ences, though  he  affect  one  more  than  another,  yet 
who  shall  say  this  one  is  a  poet  and  that  one  is  not  ? 
"  There  may  be  any  number  of  supremes,"  says  the 
master,  and  "  one  by  no  means  contravenes  another." 
Every  gas  is  a  vacuum  to  every  other  gas,  says  Emer- 
son, quoting  the  scientist ;  and  every  great  poet  com- 
plements and  leaves  the  world  free  to  every  other 
great  poet. 

Emerson's  limitation  or  fixity  is  seen  also  in  the 
fact  that  he  has  taken  no  new  step  in  his  own  di- 
rection, if  indeed  another  step  could  be  taken  in 
that  direction,  and  not  step  off.  He  is  a  prisoner  on 
his  peak.  He  cannot  get  away  from  the  old  themes. 
His  later  essays  are  upon  essentially  the  same  sub- 
jects as  his  first.  He  began  by  writing  upon  nature, 
greatness,  manners,  art,  poetry,  etc.,  and  he  is  still 
writing  upon  them.  He  is  a  husbandman  who  prac- 
tices no  rotation  of  crops,  but  submits  to  the  exhaust- 
ive process  of  taking  about  the  same  things  from  his 
soil  year  after  year.  Some  readers  think  they  detect 
a  falling  off.  It  is  evident  there  is  not  the  same 
spontaneity,  and  that  the  soil  has  to  be  more  and 
more  stirred  and  encouraged,  which  is  not  at  all  to  be 
wondered  at. 

But  if  Emerson  has  not  advanced,  he  has  not  re- 
ceded, at  least  in  conviction  and  will,  which  is  always 


EMERSON.  203 

the  great  danger  with  our  bold  prophets.  The  world 
in  which  he  lives,  the  themes  upon  which  he  writes, 
never  become  hackneyed  to  him.  They  are  always 
fresh  and  new.  He  has  hardened,  but  time  has  not 
abated  one  jot  or  tittle  his  courage  and  hope  —  no 
cynicism  and  no  relaxing  of  his  hold,  no  decay  of  his 
faith,  while  the  nobleness  of  his  tone,  the  chivalry 
of  his  utterance,  is  even  more  marked  than  at  first. 
Better  a  hundred-fold  than  his  praise  of  fine  manners 
is  the  delicacy  and  courtesy  and  the  grace  of  generous 
breeding  displayed  on  every  page.  Why  does  one 
grow  impatient  and  vicious  when  Emerson  writes  of 
fine  manners  and  the  punctilios  of  conventional  life, 
and  feel  like  kicking  into  the  street  every  divinity  en- 
shrined in  the  drawing-room  ?  It  is  a  kind  of  insult 
to  a  man  to  speak  the  word  in  his  presence.  Purify 
the  parlors  indeed,  by  keeping  out  the  Choctaws,  the 
laughers  !  Let  us  go  and  hold  high  carnival  for  a 
week,  and  split  the  ears  of  the  groundlings  with  our 
"  contemptible  squeals  of  joy."  And  when  he  makes 
a  dead  set  at  praising  eloquence  I  find  myself  in- 
stantly on  the  side  of  the  old  clergyman  he  tells  of 
who  prayed  that  he  might  never  be  eloquent;  or 
when  he  makes  the  test  of  a  man  an  intellectual  one, 
as  his  skill  at  repartee,  and  praises  the  literary  crack 
shot,  and  defines  manliness  to  be  readiness,  as  he 
does  in  this  last  volume  and  in  the  preceding  one,  I 
am  filled  with  a  perverse  envy  of  all  the  confused  and 
stammering  heroes  of  history.  Is  Washington  falter- 
ing out  a  few  broken  and  ungrammatical  sentences  in 


204  EMERSON. 

reply  to  the  vote  of  thanks  of  the  Virginia  legislature, 
less  manly  than  the  glib  tongue  in  the  court  room  or 
in  the  club  that  can  hit  the  mark  every  time  ?  The 
test  of  a  wit  or  of  a  scholar  is  one  thing ;  the  test  of 
a  man,  I  take  it,  is  quite  another.  In  this  and  some 
other  respects  Emerson  is  well  antidoted  by  Carlyle, 
who  lays  the  stress  on  the  opposite  qualities,  and 
charges  his  hero  to  hold  his  tongue.  But  one  cheer- 
fully forgives  Emerson  the  way  he  puts  his  thumb- 
nail on  the  bores.  He  speaks  feelingly,  and  no  doubt 
from  as  deep  an  experience  as  any  man  in  America. 

I  really  hold  Emerson  in  such  high  esteem,  that  I 
think  I  can  safely  indulge  myself  in  a  little  more 
fault-finding  with  him. 

I  think  it  must  be  admitted  that  he  is  deficient  in 
sympathy.  This  accounts  in  a  measure  for  his  cool- 
ness, his  self-possession,  and  that  kind  of  uncompro- 
mising rectitude  or  inflexibleness  that  marks  his 
career  and  that  he  so  lauds  in  his  essays.  No  man 
is  so  little  liable  to  be  warped  or  compromised  in  any 
way  as  the  unsympathetic  man.  Emerson's  ideal  is 
the  man  who  stands  firm,  who  is  unmoved,  who  never 
laughs,  or  apologizes,  or  deprecates,  or  makes  con- 
cessions, or  assents  through  good-nature,  or  goes 
abroad ;  who  is  not  afraid  of  giving  offense  ;  "  who 
answers  you  without  supplication  in  his  eye  "  —  in 
fact,  who  stands  like  a  granite  pillar  amid  the  slough 
of  life.  You  may  wrestle  with  this  man,  he  says,  or 
swim  with  him,  or  lodge  in  the  same  chamber  with 
him,  or  eat  at  the  same  table,  and  yet  he  is  a  thou- 


EMERSON.  205 

sand  miles  off,  and  can  at  any  moment  finish  with  you. 
He  is  a  sheer  precipice,  is  this  man,  and  not  to  be 
trifled  with.  You  shrinking,  quivering,  acquiescing 
natures,  avaunt !  You  sensitive  plants,  you  hesitat- 
ing, indefinite  creatures,  you  uncertain  around  the 
edges,  you  non-resisting,  and  you  heroes,  whose  cour- 
age is  quick,  but  whose  wit  is  tardy,  make  way,  and 
let  the  human  crustacean  pass.  Emerson  is  moulded 
upon  this  pattern.  It  is  no  mush  and  milk  that  you 
get  at  this  table.  "  A  great  man  is  coming  to  dine 
with  me  ;  I  do  not  wish  to  please  him ;  I  wish  that 
he  should  wish  to  please  me."  On  the  lecture  stand 
he  might  be  of  wood  so  far  as  he  is  responsive  to  the 
moods  and  feelings  of  his  auditors.  They  must  come 
to  him  ;  he  will  not  go  to  them  ;  but  they  do  not 
always  come.  Latterly  the  people  have  felt  insulted, 
the  lecturer  showed  them  so  little  respect.  Then, 
before  a  promiscuous  gathering,  and  in  stirring  and 
eventful  times  like  ours,  what  anachronisms  most  of 
his  lectures  are,  even  if  we  take  the  high  ground 
that  they  are  pearls  before  swine.  The  swine  may 
safely  demand  some  apology  of  him  who  offers  them 
pearls  instead  of  corn. 

Emerson's  fibre  is  too  fine  for  large  public  uses. 
He  is  what  he  is,  and  is  to  be  accepted  as  such,  only 
let  us  know  what  he  is.  He  does  not  speak  to  uni- 
versal conditions,  or  to  human  nature  in  its  broadest, 
deepest,  strongest  phases.  His  thought  is  far  above 
the  great  sea  level  of  humanity,  where  stand  most  of 
the  world's  masters.     He  is  like  one  of  those  mar- 


206  EMERSON. 

velously  clear  mountain  lakes  whose  water  line  runs 
above  all  the  salt  seas  of  the  globe.  He  is  very  pre- 
cious, taken  at  his  real  worth.  Why  find  fault  with 
the  isolation  and  the  remoteness  in  view  of  the  sky- 
like  purity  and  depth  ? 

Still  I  must  go  on  sounding  and  exploring  him,  re- 
porting where  I  touch  bottom  and  where  1  do  not.  He 
reaps  great  advantage  from  his  want  of  sympathy. 
The  world  makes  no  inroads  upon  him  through  this 
channel.  He  is  not  distracted  by  the  throng  or  may 
be  the  mob  of  emotions  that  find  entrance  here.  He 
shines  like  a  star  undimmed  by  current  events.  He 
speaks  as  from  out  the  interstellar  spaces.  'T  is  vul- 
gar sympathy  makes  mortals  of  us  all,  and  I  think 
Emerson's  poetry  finally  lacks  just  that  human  color- 
ing and  tone,  that  flesh  tint  of  the  heart,  that  vulgar 
sympathy  with  human  life  as  such  imparts. 

But  after  we  have  made  all  possible  deductions 
from  Emerson  there  remains  the  fact  that  he  is  a 
living  force,  and,  tried  by  home  standards,  a  master. 
Wherein  does  the  secret  of  his  power  lie  ?  He  is 
the  prophet  and  philosopher  of  young  men.  The  old 
man  and  the  man  of  the  world  make  little  of  him, 
but  of  the  youth  who  is  ripe  for  him  he  takes  almost 
an  unfair  advantage.  One  secret  of  his  charm  I  take 
to  be  the  instant  success  with  which  he  transfers  our 
interest  in  the  romantic,  the  chivalrous,  the  heroic,  to 
the  sphere  of  morals  and  the  intellect.  We  are  let 
into  another  realm  unlooked  for,  where  daring  and 
imagination  also  lead.      The  secret  and  suppressed 


EMERSON.  207 

heart  finds  a  champion.  To  the  young  man  fed  upon 
the  penny  precepts  and  staple  Johnsonianism  of  Eng- 
lish literature,  and  of  what  is  generally  doled  out  in 
the  schools  and  colleges,  it  is  a  surprise ;  it  is  a  rev- 
elation. A  new  world  opens  before  him.  The  neb- 
ulae of  his  spirit  are  resolved  or  shown  to  be  irre- 
solvable. The  fixed  stars  of  his  inner  firmament 
are  brought  immeasurably  near.  He  drops  all  other 
books.  He  will  gaze  and  wonder.  From  Locke  or 
Johnson  or  Wayland  to  Emerson  is  like  a  change 
from  the  school  history  to  the  "Arabian  Nights." 
There  may  be  extravagances  and  some  jugglery,  but 
for  all  that  the  lesson  is  a  genuine  one,  and  to  us 
of  this  generation  immense. 

Emerson  is  the  knight  errant  of  the  moral  senti- 
ment. He  leads  in  our  time  and  country,  one  illus- 
trious division,  at  least,  in  the  holy  crusade  of  the 
affections  and  the  intuitions  against  the  usurpations 
of  tradition  and  theological  dogma.  He  marks  the 
flower,  the  culmination,  under  American  conditions 
and  in  the  finer  air  of  the  new  world,  of  the  reaction 
begun  by  the  German  philosophers  and  passed  along 
by  later  French  and  English  thinkers,  of  man  against 
circumstance,  of  spirit  against  form,  of  the  present 
against  the  past.  What  splendid  affirmation,  what 
inspiring  audacity,  what  glorious  egoism,  what  gener- 
ous brag,  what  sacred  impiety !  There  is  an  eclat 
about  his  words  and  a  brave  challenging  of  immense 
odds  that  is  like  an  army  with  banners.  It  stirs  the 
blood  like  a  bugle  call :  beauty,  bravery,  and  a  sacred 


208  EMERSON. 

cause  —  the  three  things  that  win  with  us  always. 
The  first  essay  is  a  forlorn  hope.  See  what  the 
chances  are :  "  The  world  exists  for  the  education  of 
each  man He  should  see  that  he  can  live  all  his- 
tory in  his  own  person.  He  must  sit  solidly  at  home, 
and  not  suffer  himself  to  be  bullied  by  kings  or  em- 
pires, but  know  that  he  is  greater  than  all  the  geog- 
raphy and  all  the  government  of  the  world ;  he  must 
transfer  the  point  of  view  from  which  history  is  com- 
monly read  from  Rome  and  Athens  and  London  to 
himself,  and  not  deny  his  conviction  that  he  is  the 
court,  and  if  England  or  Egypt  have  anything  to  say 
to  him,  he  will  try  the  case ;  if  not,  let  them  forever 
be  silent."  In  every  essay  that  follows  there  are  the 
same  great  odds  and  the  same  electric  call  to  the 
youth  to  face  them.  It  is  indeed  as  much  a  world  of 
fable  and  romance  that  Emerson  introduces  us  to  as 
we  get  in  Homer  or  Herodotus.  It  is  true,  all  true  — 
true  as  Arthur  and  his  knights,  or  "  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress," and  I  pity  the  man  who  has  not  tasted  its  intox- 
ication, or  who  can  see  nothing  in  it. 

The  intuitions  are  the  bright  band,  without  armor 
or  shield,  that  slay  the  mailed  and  bucklered  giants 
of  the  understanding.  Government,  institutions,  re- 
ligions, fall  before  the  glance  of  the  hero's  eye.  Art 
and  literature,  Shakespeare,  Angelo,  iEschylus,  are 
humble  suppliants  before  you,  the  king.  The  com- 
monest fact  is  idealized,  and  the  whole  relation  of 
man  to  the  universe  is  thrown  into  a  kind  of  gigantic 
perspective.    It  is  not  much  to  say  there  is  exagger- 


EMERSON.  209 

ation  ;  the  very  start  makes  Mohammed's  attitude 
toward  the  mountain  tame.  The  mountain  shall 
come  to  Mohammed,  and  in  the  eyes  of  all  born 
readers  of  Emerson,  the  mountain  does  come,  and 
comes  with  alacrity. 

Some  shrewd  judges  apprehend  that  Emerson  is 
not  going  to  last ;  basing  their  opinion  upon  the  fact, 
already  alluded  to,  that  we  outgrow  him,  or  pass 
through  him  as  through  an  experience  that  we  can- 
not repeat.  He  is  but  a  bridge  to  other  things ;  he 
gets  you  over.  He  is  an  exceptional  fact  in  liter- 
ature, say  they,  and  does  not  represent  lasting  or  uni- 
versal conditions.  He  is  too  fine  for  the  rough  wear 
and  tear  of  ages.  True  we  do  not  outgrow  Dante, 
or  Cervantes,  or  Bacon ;  and  I  doubt  if  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  stock  at  least  ever  outgrows  that  king  of  ro- 
mancers, Walter  Scott.  These  men  and  their  like 
appeal  to  a  larger  audience,  and  in  some  respects  a 
more  adult  one ;  at  least  one  more  likely  to  be  found 
in  every  age  and  people.  Their  achievement  was 
more  from  the  common  level  of  human  nature  than 
are  Emerson's  astonishing  paradoxes.  Yet  I  believe 
his  work  has  the  seal  of  immortality  upon  it  as  much 
as  that  of  any  of  them.  No  doubt  he  has  a  meaning 
to  us  now  and  in  this  country  that  will  be  lost  to  suc- 
ceeding time.  His  religious  significance  will  not  be 
so  important  to  the  next  generation.  He  is  being  or 
has  been  so  completely  absorbed  by  his  times,  that 
readers  and  hearers  hereafter  will  get  him  from  a 
thousand  sources,  or  his  contribution  will  become  the 
14 


210  EMERSON. 

common  property  of  the  race.  All  the  masters  prob- 
ably had  some  peculiar  import  or  tie  to  their  con- 
temporaries that  we  at  a  distance  miss.  It  is  thought 
by  scholars  that  we  have  lost  the  key,  or  one  key,  to 
Dante,  and  Chaucer,  and  Shakespeare  —  the  key  or 
the  insight  that  people  living  under  the  same  roof 
get  of  each  other. 

But  aside  from  and  over  and  above  everything  else, 
Emerson  appeals  to  youth  and  to  genius.  If  you  have 
these,  you  will  understand  him  and  delight  in  him ; 
if  not,  or  neither  of  them,  you  will  make  little  of  him. 
And  I  do  not  see  why  this  should  not  be  just  as  true 
any  time  hence  as  at  present. 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 


TO  WALT  WHITMAN. 

M  I,  thirty-six  years  old,  in  perfect  health,  begin, 
Hoping  to  cease  not  till  death." 

Chants  Democratic 

They  say  that  thou  art  sick,  art  growing  old, 

Thou  Poet  of  unconquerable  health, 

With  youth  far-stretching,  through  the  golden  wealth 
Of  autumn,  to  Death;s  frostful,  friendly  cold, 
The  never-blenching  eyes,  that  did  behold 

Life's  fair  and  foul,  with  measureless  content, 

And  gaze  ne'er  sated,  gaddened  as  they  bent 
Over  the  dying  soldier  in  the  fold 

Of  thy  large  comrade  lore  ;  — then  broke  the  tear  ! 
War-dream,  field-vigil,  the  bequeathed  kiss, 

Have  brought  old  age  to  thee  ;  yet,  Master,  now, 
Cease  not  thy  song  to  us  ;  lest  we  should  miss 

A  death-chant  of  indomitable  cheer, 
Blown  as  a  gale  from  God ;  —  oh  sing  it  thou  ! 

Arras  Leigh  (England). 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 


Whoever  Has  witnessed  the  flight  of  any  of  the 
great  birds,  as  the  eagle,  the  condor,  the  sea-gulls,  the 
proud  hawks,  etc.,  has  perhaps  felt  that  the  poetic 
suggestion  of  the  feathered  tribes  is  not  all  confined 
to  the  sweet  and  tiny  songsters  —  the  thrushes,  cana- 
ries, and  mocking-birds  of  the  groves  and  orchards,  or 
of  the  gilded  cage  in  my  lady's  chamber.  It  is  by 
some  such  analogy  that  I  would  indicate  the  charac- 
ter of  the  poetry  I  am  about  to  discuss  —  compared 
with  that  of  the  more  popular  and  melodious  singer ; 
the  poetry  of  the  strong  wing  and  the  daring  flight. 

Well  and  profoundly  has  a  Danish  critic  said,  in 
"  For  Ide  og  Virkelighed  "  ("  For  the  Idea  and  the 
Reality"),  a  Copenhagen  magazine  :  — 

"  It  may  be  candidly  admitted  that  the  American 
poet  has  not  the  elegance,  special  melody,  nor  re- 
cherche aroma  of  the  accepted  poets  of  Europe  or  his 
own  country ;  but  his  compass  and  general  harmony 
are  infinitely  greater.  The  sweetness  and  spice,  the 
poetic  ennui,  the  tender  longings,  the  exquisite  art- 
finish  of  those  choice  poets  are  mainly  unseen  and 
unmet  in  him  —  perhaps  because  he  cannot  achieve 


214  THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

them  —  more  likely  because  lie  disdains  them.  But 
there  is  an  electric  living  soul  in  his  poetry,  far  more 
fermenting  and  bracing.  His  wings  do  not  glitter  in 
their  movement  from  rich  and  vari-colored  plumage, 
nor  are  his  notes  those  of  the  accustomed  song-birds ; 
but  his  flight  is  the  flight  of  the  eagle." 

Yes,  there  is  not  only  the  delighting  of  the  ear 
with  the  outpouring  of  sweetest  melody,  and  its  les- 
sons— but  there  is  the  delighting  of  the  eye  and  soul 
through  that  soaring  and  circling  in  the  vast  empy- 
rean of  "  a  strong  bird  on  pinions  free"  —  lessons  of 
freedom,  power,  grace,  and  spiritual  suggestion  — 
vast,  unparalleled,  formless  lessons. 

It  is  now  upwards  of  twenty  years  since  Walt 
Whitman  printed  (in  1855)  his  first  thin  beginning 
volume  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass ; "  and  holding  him  to 
the  test  which  he  himself  early  proclaimed,  namely, 
"  that  the  proof  of  the  poet  shall  be  sternly  deferred 
till  his  country  has  absorb'd  him  as  affectionately  as 
he  has  absorb'd  it,"  he  is  yet  on  trial,  yet  makes  his 
appeal  to  an  indifferent  or  to  a  scornful  audience. 
That  his  complete  absorption,  however,  by  his  own 
country,  and  by  the  world,  is  ultimately  to  take  place, 
is  one  of  the  beliefs  that  grows  stronger  and  stronger 
within  me  as  time  passes,  and  I  suppose  it  is  with 
a  hope  to  help  forward  this  absorption  that  I  write 
of  him  now.  Only  here  and  there  has  he  yet 
effected  a  lodgment,  usually  in  the  younger  and 
more  virile  minds.  But  considering  the  unparal- 
leled audacity  of  his  undertaking,  and  the  absence 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  215 

in  most  critics  and  readers  of  anything  like  full  grown 
and  robust  aesthetic  perception,  the  wonder  really  is 
not  that  he  should  have  made  such  slow  progress,  but 
that  he  should  have  gained  any  foothold  at  all.  The 
whole  literary  technique  of  the  race  for  the  last  two 
hundred  years  has  been  squarely  against  him,  laying 
as  it  does  the  emphasis  upon  form  and  scholarly  en- 
dowments instead  of  upon  aboriginal  power  and  man- 
hood. 

My  own  mastery  of  the  poet,  incomplete  as  it  is, 
has  doubtless  been  much  facilitated  by  contact  — 
talks,  meals,  jaunts,  etc.  —  with  him,  stretching 
through  a  decade  of  years,  and  by  seeing  how  every- 
thing in  his  personnel  was  resumed  and  carried  for- 
ward in  his  literary  expression ;  in  fact,  how  the  one 
was  a  living  commentary  upon  the  other.  After  the 
test  of  time  nothing  goes  home  like  the  test  of  actual 
intimacy,  and  to  tell  me  that  Whitman  is  not  a  large, 
fine,  fresh,  magnetic  personality,  making  you  love 
him,  and  want  always  to  be  with  him,  were  to  tell  me 
that  my  whole  past  life  is  a  deception,  and  all  the 
impression  of  my  perceptives  a  fraud.  I  have  studied 
him  as  I  have  studied  the  birds,  and  have  found  that 
the  nearer  I  got  to  him  the  more  I  saw.  Nothing 
about  a  first-class  man  can  be  overlooked ;  he  is  to 
be  studied  in  every  feature,  —  in  his  physiology  and 
phrenology,  in  the  shape  of  his  head,  in  his  brow,  his 
eye,  his  glance,  his  nose,  his  ear  (the  ear  is  as  indica- 
tive in  a  man  as  in  a  horse),  his  voice.  In  Whitman 
all  these  things  are  remarkably  striking  and  sugges- 


216  THE    FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 

tive.  His  face  exhibits  a  rare  combination  of  har- 
mony and  sweetness  with  strength,  —  strength  like 
the  vaults  and  piers  of  the  Roman  architecture. 
Sculptor  never  carved  a  finer  ear  or  a  more  imagina- 
tive brow.  Then  his  heavy-lidded,  absorbing  eye, 
his  sympathetic  voice,  and  the  impression  which  he 
makes  of  starting  from  the  broad  bases  of  the  uni- 
versal human  traits.  (If  Whitman  was  grand  in  his 
physical  and  perfect  health,  I  think  him  far  more  so 
now  (1877)  cheerfully  mastering  paralysis,  penury, 
and  old  age.)  You  know  on  seeing  the  man  and 
becoming  familiar  with  his  presence,  that  if  he  achieve 
the  height  at  all  it  will  be  from  where  every  man 
stands,  and  not  from  some  special  genius,  or  excep- 
tional and  adventitious  point.  He  does  not  make  the 
impression  of  the  scholar  or  artist  or  litterateur,  but 
such  as  you  would  imagine  the  antique  heroes  to 
make,  that  of  a  sweet  blooded,  receptive,  perfectly 
normal,  catholic  man,  with,  further  than  that,  a  look 
about  him  that  is  best  suggested  by  the  word  ele- 
mental or  cosmical.  It  was  this,  doubtless,  that  led 
Thoreau  to  write,  after  an  hour's  interview,  "  that  he 
suggested  something  a  little  more  than  human."  In 
fact,  the  main  clew  to  Walt  Whitman's  life  and  per- 
sonality, and  the  expression  of  them  in  his  poems,  is 
to  be  found  in  about  the  largest  emotional  element 
that  has  appeared  anywhere.  This,  if  not  controlled 
by  a  potent  rational  balance,  would  either  have  tossed 
him  helplessly  forever,  or  wrecked  him  as  disastrously 
as  ever  storm  and  gale  drove  ship  to  ruin.     These 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       217 

volcanic  emotional  fires  appear  everywhere  in  his 
books,  and  it  is  really  these,  aroused  to  intense  activ- 
ity and  unnatural  strain  during  the  four  years  of  the 
war,  and  persistent  labors  in  the  hospitals,  that  have 
resulted  in  his  illness  and  paralysis  since. 

It  has  been  impossible,  I  say,  to  resist  these  per- 
sonal impressions  and  magnetisms,  and  impossible 
with  me  not  to  follow  them  up  in  the  poems,  in  doing 
which  I  found  that  his  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  was  really 
the  drama  of  himself,  played  upon  various  and  succes- 
sive stages  of  nature,  history,  passion,  experience, 
patriotism,  etc.,  and  that  he  had  not  made,  nor  had  he 
intended  to  make,  mere  excellent  "poems,"  tunes, 
statues,  or  statuettes,  in  the  ordinary  sense. 

Before  the  man's  complete  acceptance  and  assimila- 
tion by  America,  he  may  have  to  be  first  passed  down 
through  the  minds  of  critics  and  commentators,  and 
given  to  the  people  with  some  of  his  rank  new  quality 
taken  off —  a  quality  like  that  which  adheres  to  ob- 
jects in  the  open  air,  and  makes  them  either  forbid- 
ding or  attractive,  as  one's  mood  is  healthful  and  robust 
or  feeble  and  languid.  The  processes  are  silently  at 
work.  Already  seen  from  a  distance,  and  from  other 
atmospheres  and  surroundings,  he  assumes  magnitude 
and  orbic  coherence;  for  in  curious  contrast  to  the 
general  denial  of  Whitman  in  this  country  (though  he 
has  more  lovers  and  admirers  here  than  is  generally 
believed)  stands  the  reception  accorded  him  in  Eu- 
rope. The  poets  there,  almost  without  exception, 
recognize  his  transcendent  quality,  the  men  of  sci- 


218       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

ence  his  thorough  scientific  basis,  the  republicans  his 
inborn  democracy,  and  all  his  towering  picturesque 
personality  and  modernness.  Prof.  Clifford  says  he 
is  more  thoroughly  in  harmony  with  the  spirit  and 
letter  of  advanced  scientism  than  any  other  living 
poet.  Prof.  Tyrrell  and  Mr.  Symonds  find  him  em- 
inently Greek,  in  the  sense  in  which  to  be  natural 
and  "  self-regulated  by  the  law  of  perfect  health,"  is  to 
be  Greek.  The  French  "  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  " 
pronounces  his  war  poems  the  most  vivid,  the  most 
humanly  passionate,  and  the  most  modern,  of  all  the 
verse  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Freiligrath  trans- 
lated him  into  German,  and  hailed  him  as  the  founder 
of  a  new  democratic  and  modern  order  of  poetry, 
greater  than  the  old.  But  I  do  not  propose  to  go 
over  the  whole  list  here ;  I  only  wish  to  indicate  that 
the  absorption  is  well  commenced  abroad,  and  that 
probably  her  poet  will  at  last  reach  America,  by  way 
of  those  far-off,  roundabout  channels.  The  old  mother 
will  first  masticate  and  moisten  the  food  which  is  still 
too  tough  for  her  offspring. 

When  I  first  fell  in  with  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  I  was 
taken  by  isolated  passages  scattered  here  and  there 
through  the  poems  ;  these  I  seized  upon,  and  gave 
myself  no  concern  about  the  rest.  Single  lines  in  it 
often  went  to  the  bottom  of  the  questions  that  were 
vexing  me.  The  following,  though  less  here  than 
when  encountered  in  the  frame  of  mind  which  the 
poet  begets  in  you,  curiously  settled  and  stratified  a 
certain  range  of  turbid  fluctuating  inquiry :  — 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE.  219 

"  There  was  never  any  more  inception  than  there  is  now,  — 
Nor  any  more  youth  or  age  than  there  is  now  ; 
And  will  never  be  any  more  perfection  than  there  is  now, 
Nor  any  more  heaven  or  hell  than  there  is  now." 

These  lines,  also,  early  had  an  attraction  for  me  1 
could  not  define,  and  were  of  great  service :  — 

"  Pleasantly  and  well-suited  I  walk, 
"Whither  I  walk  I  cannot  define,  but  I  know  it  is  good, 
The  whole  universe  indicates  that  it  is  good, 
The  past  and  the  present  indicate  that  it  is  good." 

In  the  following  episode,  too,  there  was  to  me  some- 
thing far  deeper  than  the  words  or  story :  — 

"  The  runaway  slave  came  to  my  house  and  stopt  outside ; 
I  heard  his  motions  crackling  the  twigs  of  the  wood-pile; 
Through  the  swung  half-door  of  the  kitchen  I  saw  him  limpsy 

and  weak, 
And  went  where  he  sat  on  a  log,  and  led  him  in,  and  assured 

him, 
And  brought  water  and  fill'd  a  tub  for  his  sweated  body  and 

bruis'd  feet, 
And  gave  him  a  room  that  entered  from  my  own,  and  gave  him 

some  coarse  clean  clothes ; 
And  remember  perfectly  well  his  revolving  eyes  and  his  awk- 
wardness, 
And  remember  putting  plasters  on  the  galls  of  his  neck  and 

ankles: 
He  stayed  with  me  a  week  before  he  was  recuperated  and  pass'd 

North ; 
(I  had  him  sit  next  me  at  table  —  my  firelock  lean'd  in  the 

corner.)" 

But  of  the  book  as  a  whole  I  could  form  no  ade- 
quate conception,  and  it  was  not  till  many,  years,  and 
after  I  had  known  the  poet  himself,  as  already  stated, 
that  I  saw  in  it  a  teeming,  rushing  globe  well  worthy 


220  THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

my  best  days  and  strength  to  surround  and  compre- 
hend. 

One  thing  that  early  took  me  in  the  poems  was 
(as  before  alluded  to)  the  tremendous  personal  force 
back  of  them,  and  felt  through  them  as  the  sun 
through  vapor;  not  merely  intellectual  grasp  or  push, 
but  a  warm,  breathing,  towering,  magnetic  Presence 
that  there  was  no  escape  from. 

Another  fact  I  was  quick  to  perceive,  namely,  that 
this  man  had  almost  in  excess  a  quality  in  which 
every  current  poet  was  lacking  —  I  mean  the  faculty 
of  being  in  entire  sympathy  with  actual  Nature,  and 
the  objects  and  shows  of  Nature,  and  of  rude,  abysmal 
man  ;  and  appalling  directness  of  utterance  therefrom, 
at  first  hand,  without  any  intermediate  agency  or 
modification. 

The  influence  of  books  and  works  of  art  upon  an 
author  may  be  seen  in  all  respectable  writers.  If 
knowledge  alone  made  literature,  or  culture  genius, 
there  would  be  no  dearth  of  these  things  among  the 
moderns.  But  I  feel  bound  to  say  that  there  is  some- 
thing higher  and  deeper  than  the  influence  or  perusal 
of  any  or  all  books,  or  all  other  productions  of  gen- 
ius —  a  quality  of  information  which  the  masters  can 
never  impart,  and  which  all  the  libraries  do  not  hold. 
This  is  the  absorption  by  an  author,  previous  to  be- 
coming so,  of  the  spirit  of  Nature,  through  the  visi- 
ble objects  of  the  universe,  and  his  affiliation  with 
them  subjectively  and  objectively.  Not  more  surely 
is  the  blood  quickened  and  purified  by  contact  with 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       221 

the  unbreathed  air,  than  is  the  spirit  of  man  vitalized 
and  made  strong  by  intercourse  with  the  real  things 
of  the  earth.  The  calm,  all-permitting,  wordless 
spirit  of  Nature  —  yet  so  eloquent  to  him  who  hath 
ears  to  hear !  The  sunrise,  the  heaving  sea,  the 
woods  and  mountains,  the  storm  and  the  whistling 
winds,  the  gentle  summer  day,  the  winter  sights  and 
sounds,  the  night,  and  the  high  dome  of  stars  —  to 
have  really  perused  these,  especially  from  childhood 
onward,  till  what  there  is  in  them,  so  impossible  to 
define,  finds  its  full  mate  and  echo  in  the  mind  —  this 
only  is  the  lore  which  breathes  the  breath  of  life  into 
all  the  rest.  Without  it,  literary  productions  may 
have  the  superb  beauty  of  statues,  but  with  it  only 
can  they  have  the  beauty  of  life. 

I  was  never  troubled  at  all  by  what  the  critics 
called  Whitman's  want  of  art,  or  his  violation  of  art. 
I  saw  that  he  at  once  designedly  swept  away  all 
which  the  said  critics  have  commonly  meant  by  that 
term.  The  dominant  impression  was  of  the  living 
presence  and  voice.  He  would  have  no  curtains,  he 
said,  not  the  finest,  between  himself  and  his  reader ; 
and  in  thus  bringing  me  face  to  face  with  his  subject 
I  perceived  he  not  only  did  not  escape  conventional 
art,  but  I  perceived  an  enlarged,  enfranchised  art  in 
this  very  abnegation  of  art.  "  When  half-gods  go, 
whole  gods  arrive."  It  was  obvious  to  me  that  the 
new  style  gained  more  than  it  lost,  and  that  in  this 
fullest  operatic  launching  forth  of  the  voice,  though 
it  sounded  strangely  at  first,  and  required  the  ear  to 


222  THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

get  used  to  it,  there  might  be  quite  as  much  science, 
and  a  good  deal  more  power,  than  in  the  tuneful  but 
constricted  measures  we  were  accustomed  to. 

To  the  eye  the  page  of  the  new  poet  presented 
about  the  same  contrast  with  the  page  of  the  popular 
poets  that  trees  and  the  free  unbidden  growths  of 
nature  do  with  a  carefully  clipped  hedge ;  and  to  the 
spirit  the  contrast  was  about  the  same.  The  hedge 
is  the  more  studiedly  and  obviously  beautiful,  but  ah ! 
there  is  a  kind  of  beauty  and  satisfaction  in  trees  that 
one  would  not  care  to  lose.  There  is  symmetry  and 
proportion  in  the  sonnet,  but  to  me  there  is  some- 
thing I  would  not  exchange  for  them  in  the  wild 
swing  and  balance  of  many  unmeasured  and  un- 
rhymed  passages  in  Shakespeare :  like  the  one  for  in- 
stance in  which  these  lines  occur :  — 

"  To  be  imprisoned  in  the  viewless  winds, 
And  blown  with  restless  violence  round 
About  the  pendent  world." 

Here  is  the  spontaneous  grace  and  symmetry  of  a 
forest  tree,  or  a  soughing  mass  of  foliage. 

And  this  passage  from  my  poet  I  do  not  think 
could  be  improved  by  the  verse-maker's  art :  — 

"  This  day  before  dawn  I  ascended  a  hill  and  look'd  at  the  crowded 
heaven, 

And  I  said  to  my  Spirit,  When  we  become  the  enfoMers  of  those 
orbs,  and  the  pleasure  and  knowledge  of  everything  in  them, 
shall  we  be  fiWd  and  satisfied  then  f 

And  my  Spirit  said,  No,  we  but  level  that  lift,  to  pass  and  con- 
tinue beyond." 


THE   FLIGHT   OF  THE   EAGLE.  223 

Such  breaking  with  the  routine  poetic,  and  with 
the  grammar  of  verse,  was  of  course  a  dangerous  ex- 
periment, and  threw  the  composer  absolutely  upon 
his  intrinsic  merits,  upon  his  innately  poetic  and 
rhythmic  quality.  He  must  stand  or  fall  by  these 
alone,  since  he  discarded  all  artificial,  all  adventitious 
helps.  If  interior,  spontaneous  rhythm  could  not  be 
relied  upon,  and  the  natural  music  and  flexibility  of 
language,  then  there  was  nothing  to  shield  the  ear 
from  the  pitiless  hail  of  words  —  not  one  softly 
padded  verse  anywhere. 

All  poets,  except  those  of  the  very  first  order,  owe 
immensely  to  the  form,  the  art,  to  the  stereotyped 
metres  and  stock  figures  they  find  ready  to  their 
hand.  The  form  is  suggestive  —  it  invites  and  aids 
expression,  and  lends  itself  readily,  like  fashion,  to 
conceal,  or  extenuate,  or  eke  out  poverty  of  thought 
and  feeling  in  the  verse.  The  poet  can  "  cut  and 
cover,"  as  the  farmer  says,  in  a  way  the  prose-writer 
never  can,  nor  one  whose  form  is  essentially  prose, 
like  Whitman's. 

I,  too,  love  to  see  the  forms  worthily  used,  as  they 
always  are  by  the  master ;  and  I  have  no  expectation 
that  they  are  going  out  of  fashion  right  away.  A 
great  deal  of  poetry  that  serves,  and  helps  sweeten, 
one's  cup,  would  be  impossible  without  them  —  would 
be  nothing  when  separated  from  them.  It  is  for  the 
ear  and  the  sense  of  tune,  and  of  carefully  carved 
and  modeled  forms,  and  is  not  meant  to  arouse  the 
soul  with   the  taste   of  power,  and   to  start  off  on 


224  THE   FLIGHT    OF   THE   EAGLE. 

journeys  for  itself.  But  the  great  inspired  utter- 
ances, like  the  Bible  —  what  would  they  gain  by 
being  cast  in  the  moulds  of  metrical  verse  ? 

In  all  that  concerns  art,  viewed  from  any  high 
stand-point,  —  proportion,  continence,  self-control, 
unfaltering  adherence  to  natural  standards,  subordi- 
nation of  parts,  perfect  adjustment  of  the  means  to 
the  end,  obedience  to  inward  law,  no  trifling,  no  lev- 
ity, no  straining  after  effect,  impartially  attending  to 
the  back  and  loins  as  well  as  to  the  head,  and  even 
holding  toward  his  subject  an  attitude  of  perfect  ac- 
ceptance and  equality,  —  principles  of  art  to  which 
alone  the  great  spirits  are  amenable,  —  in  all  these 
respects,  I  say,  this  poet  is  as  true  as  an  orb  in 
astronomy. 

To  his  literary  expression  pitched  on  scales  of  such 
unprecedented  breadth  and  loftiness,  the  contrast  of 
his  personal  life  comes  in  with  a  foil  of  curious  home- 
liness and  simplicity.  Perhaps  never  before  has  the 
absolute  and  average  commonness  of  humanity,  been 
so  steadily  and  unaffectedly  adhered  to.  I  give  here  a 
glimpse  of  him  in  Washington  on  a  Navy  Yard  horse 
car,  toward  the  close  of  the  war,  one  summer  day  at 
sundown.  The  car  is  crowded  and  suffocatingly  hot, 
with  many  passengers  on  the  rear  platform,  and 
among  them  a  bearded,  florid-faced  man,  elderly,  but 
agile,  resting  against  the  dash,  by  the  side  of  the 
young  conductor,  and  evidently  his  intimate  friend. 
The  man  wears  a  broad-brim  white  hat.  Among  the 
jam  inside  near  the  door,  a  young  Englishwoman,  of 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  225 

the  working  class,  with  two  children,  has  had  trouble 
all  the  way  with  the  youngest,  a  strong,  fat,  fretful, 
bright  babe  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  months,  who  bids 
fair  to  worry  the  mother  completely  out,  besides  be- 
coming a  howling  nuisance  to  everybody.  As  the  car 
tugs  around  Capitol  Hill  the  young  one  is  more  de- 
moniac than  ever,  and  the  flushed  and  perspiring 
mother  is  just  ready  to  burst  into  tears  with  weariness 
and  vexation.  The  car  stops  at  the  top  of  the  hill 
to  let  off  most  of  the  rear  platform  passengers,  and 
the  white-hatted  man  reaches  inside  and  gently  but 
firmly  disengaging  the  babe  from  its  stifling  place  in 
the  mother's  arms,  takes  it  in  his  own,  and  out  in  the 
air.  The  astonished  and  excited  child,  partly  in  fear, 
partly  in  satisfaction  at  the  change,  stops  its  scream- 
ing, and  as  the  man  adjusts  it  more  securely  to  his 
breast,  plants  its  chubby  hands  against  him,  and  push- 
ing off  as  far  as  it  can,  gives  a  good  long  look  squarely 
in  his  face  —  then  as  if  satisfied  snuggles  down  with 
its  head  on  his  neck,  and  in  less  than  a  minute  is 
sound  and  peacefully  asleep  without  another  whimper, 
utterly  fagged  out.  A  square  or  so  more  and  the 
conductor,  who  has  had  an  unusually  hard  and  unin- 
terrupted day's  work,  gets  off  for  his  first  meal  and 
relief  since  morning.  And  now  the  white-hatted 
man,  holding  the  slumbering  babe  also,  acts  as  con- 
ductor the  rest  of  the  distance,  keeping  his  eye  on 
the  passengers  inside,  who  have  by  this  time  thinned 
out  greatly.  He  makes  a  very  good  conductor,  too, 
pulling  the  bell  to  stop  or  go  on  as  needed,  and 
15 


226  THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 

seems  to  enjoy  the  occupation.  The  babe  meanwhile 
rests  its  fat  cheeks  close  on  his  neck  and  gray  beard, 
one  of  his  arms  vigilantly  surrounding  it,  while  the 
other  signals,  from  time  to  time,  with  the  strap ;  and 
the  flushed  mother  inside  has  a  good  half  hour  to 
breathe,  and  cool,  and  recover  herself. 

ii. 

No  poem  of  our  day  dates  and  locates  itself  as 
absolutely  as  "  Leaves  of  Grass  ; "  but  suppose  it  had 
been  written  three  or  four  centuries  ago,  and  had  lo- 
cated itself  in  mediaeval  Europe,  and  was  now  first 
brought  to  light,  together  with  a  history  of  Walt 
Whitman's  simple  and  disinterested  life,  can  there  be 
any  doubt  about  the  cackling  that  would  at  once  break 
out  in  the  whole  brood  of  critics  over  the  golden  egg 
that  had  been  uncovered  ?  This  I  reckon  would  be 
a  favorite  passage  with  all :  — 

"  Yon  sea !  I  resign  tmrself  to  you  also  —  I  guess  what  you  mean ; 
I  behold  from  the  beach  your  crooked  inviting  fingers; 
I  believe  you  refuse  to  go  back  without  feeling  of  me; 
We  must  have  a  turn  together — I  undress  —  hurry  me  out  of 

sight  of  the  land ; 
Cushion  me  soft,  rock  me  in  billowy  drowse; 
Dash  me  with  amorous  wet  —  I  can  repay  you. 

"  Sea  of  stretch'd  ground-swells! 
Sea  breathing  broad  and  convulsive  breaths ! 
Sea  of  the  brine  of  life!   sea  of  unshovel'd  yet  always  ready 

graves ! 
Howler  and  scooper  of  storms !  capricious  and  daint}'  sea ! 
I  am  integral  with  you  —  I  too  am  of  one  phase,  and  of  all 

phases." 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       227 

This  other  passage  would  afford  many  a  text  for  the 
moralists  and  essayists  :  — 

11  Of  persons  arrived  at  high  positions,  ceremonies,  wealth,  schol- 
arship, and  the  like ; 
To  me,  all  that  those  persons  have  arrived  at  sinks  away  from 

them,  except  as  it  results  to  their  Bodies  and  Souls, 
So  that  often  to  me  they  appear  gaunt  and  naked, 
And  often  to  me,  each  one  mocks  the  others,  and  mocks  himself 

or  herself, 
And  of  each  one,  the  core  of  life,  namely  happiness,  is  full  of 

the  rotten  excrement  of  maggots; 
And  often,  to  me,  those  men  and  women  pass  unwittingly  the 

true  realities  of  life,  and  go  toward  false  realities, 
And  often  to  me  they  are  alive  after  what  custom  has  served 

them,  but  nothing  more, 
And  often  to  me,  they  are  sad,  hasty,  unwaked  somnambules, 

walking  the  dusk." 

Ah,  Time,  you  enchantress !  what  tricks  you  play 
with  us  !  The  old  is  already  proved  —  the  past  and 
the  distant  hold  nothing  but  the  beautiful. 

Or  let  us  take  another  view.  Suppose  Walt  Whit- 
man had  never  existed,  and  some  bold  essayist,  like 
Mr.  Higginson  or  Mathew  Arnold  had  projected  him 
in  abstract,  outlined  him  on  a  scholarly  ideal  back- 
ground, formulated  and  put  in  harmless  critical  pe- 
riods the  principles  of  art  which  he  illustrates,  and 
which  are  the  inevitable  logic  of  his  poems  —  said  es- 
sayist would  have  won  great  applause.  "  Yes,  indeed, 
that  were  a  poet  to  cherish ;  fill  those  shoes  and  you 
have  a  god." 

How  different  a  critic's  account  of  Shakespeare, 
from   Shakespeare  himself —  the  difference  between 


228.  THE   FLIGHT   OF    THE   EAGLE. 

the  hewn  or  sawed  timber,  and  the  living  tree.  A 
few  years  ago  we  had  here  a  lecturer  from  over  seas, 
who  gave  to  our  well-dressed  audiences  the  high, 
moral,  and  intellectual  statement  of  the  poet  Burns. 
It  was  very  fine,  and  people  were  greatly  pleased, 
vastly  more  so,  I  fear,  than  they  were  with  Burns  him- 
self. Indeed,  I  could  not  help  wondering  how  many 
of  those  appreciative  listeners  had  any  original  satis- 
faction in  the  Scotch  poet  at  first  hand,  or  would 
have  accepted  him  had  he  been  their  neighbor  and 
fellow-citizen.  But  as  he  filtered  through  the  schol- 
arly mind  in  trickling  drops,  oh,  he  was  so  sweet. 

Everybody  stirred  with  satisfaction  as  the  lecturer 
said,  "  When  literature  becomes  dozy,  respectable, 
and  goes  in  the  smooth  grooves  of  fashion,  and  copies 
and  copies  again,  something  must  be  done;  and  to 
give  life  to  that  dying  literature  a  man  must  be  found 
not  educated  under  its  influence"  I  applauded  with 
the  rest,  for  it  was  a  bold  saying,  but  I  could  not  help 
thinking  how  that  theory,  brought  home  to  ourselves, 
and  illustrated  in  a  living  example,  would  have  sent 
that  nodding  millinery  and  faultless  tailory  flying 
down-stairs,  as  at  an  alarm  of  fire. 

One  great  service  of  Walt  Whitman  is  that  he  ex- 
erts a  tremendous  influence  to  bring  the  race  up  on 
this  nether  side,  to  place  the  emotional,  the  assimila- 
tive, the  sympathetic,  the  spontaneous,  intuitive  man, 
the  man  of  the  fluids,  and  of  the  affections,  flush  with 
the  intellectual  man.  That  we  moderns  have  fallen 
behind  here  is  unquestionable,  and  we  in  this  country 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE.  229 

more  than  the  Old  World  peoples.  All  the  works 
of  Whitman,  prose  and  verse,  are  embosomed  in  a 
sea  of  emotional  humanity,  and  they  float  deeper 
than  they  show ;  there  is  far  more  in  what  they  ne- 
cessitate and  imply  than  in  what  they  say. 

It  is  not  so  much  of  fatty  degeneration  that  we  are 
in  danger  in  America,  but  of  calcareous.  The  fluids, 
moral  and  physical,  are  evaporating,  surfaces  are  be- 
coming encrusted,  there  is  a  deposit  of  flint  in  the 
veins  and  arteries,  outlines  are  abnormally  sharp  and 
hard,  nothing  is  held  in  solution,  all  is  precipitated  in 
well  defined  ideas  and  opinions. 

But  when  I  think  of  the  type  of  character  planted 
and  developed  by  my  poet,  I  think  of  a  man  or 
woman  rich  above  all  things  in  the  genial  human  at- 
tributes, one  "  nine  times  folded "  in  an  atmosphere 
of  tenderest,  most  considerate  humanity,  an  atmos- 
phere warm  with  the  breath  of  a  tropic  heart,  that 
makes  your  buds  of  affection  and.  of  genius  start 
and  unfold  like  a  south  wind  in  May.  Your  inter-, 
course  with  such  a  character  is  not  merely  intellect- 
ual ;  it  is  deeper  and  better  than  that.  Walter  Scott 
carried  such  a  fund  of  sympathy  and  good-will  that 
even  the  animals  found  fellowship  with  him,  and  the 
pigs  understood  his  great  heart. 

It  was  the  large  endowment  of  Whitman,  in  his 
own  character,  in  this  respect,  that  made  his  services 
in  the  army  hospitals,  during  the  war,  so  ministering 
and  effective,  and  that  renders  his  "  Drum-taps "  the 
tenderest  and  most  deeply  yearning  and  sorrowful  ex- 


230       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

pression  of  the  human  heart  in  poetry  that  ever  war 
called  forth.  Indeed,  from  my  own  point  of  view, 
there  is  no  false  or  dangerous  tendency  among  us,  in 
life  or  in  letters,  that  this  poet  does  not  offset  and 
correct.  Fret  and  chafe  as  much  as  we  will,  we  are 
bound  to  gravitate,  more  or  less,  toward  this  mount- 
ain, and  feel  its  bracing,  rugged  air. 

Without  a  certain  self-surrender  there  is  no  great- 
ness possible  in  literature,  any  more  than  in  religion, 
or  in  anything  else.  It  is  always  a  trait  of  the  mas- 
ter, that  he  is  not  afraid  of  being  compromised  by  the 
company  he  keeps.  He  is  the  central  and  main  fact 
in  any  company.  Nothing  so  lowly  but  he  will  do 
it  reverence ;  nothing  so  high  but  he  can  stand  in  its 
presence.  His  theme  is  the  river,  and  he  the  ample 
and  willing  channel.  Little  natures  love  to  disparage 
and  take  down  ;  they  do  it  in  self-defense,  but  the 
master  gives  you  all,  and  more  than  your  due.  Whit- 
man does  not  stand  aloof,  superior,  a  priest,  or  a 
critic ;  he  abandons  himself  to  all  the  strong  human 
currents;  he  enters  into  and  affiliates  with  every 
phase  of  life ;  he  bestows  himself  royally  upon  who- 
ever and  whatever  will  receive  him.  There  is  no 
competition  between  himself  and  his  subject ;  he  is 
not  afraid  of  overpraising,  or  making  too  much  of 
the  commonest  individual.  What  exalts  others  ex- 
alts him. 

We  have  had  great  help  in  Emerson  in  certain 
ways  —  first  class  service.  He  probes  the  conscience 
and  the  moral  purpose  as  few  men  have  done,  and 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE.  231 

gives  much  needed  stimulus  there.  But  after  him, 
the  need  is  all  the  more  pressing  for  a  broad,  power- 
ful, opulent,  human  personality  to  absorb  these  ideals, 
and  make  something  more  of  them  than  fine  sayings. 
With  Emerson  alone  we  are  rich  in  sunlight,  but 
poor  in  rain  and  dew  —  poor,  too,  in  soil,  and  in  the 
moist,  gestating  earth  principle.  Emerson's  tendency 
is  not  to  broaden  and  enrich,  but  to  concentrate  and 
refine. 

Then,  is  there  not  an  excessive  modesty,  without 
warrant  in  philosophy  or  nature,  dwindling  us  in  this 
country,  drying  us  up  in  the  viscera?  Is  there  not  a 
decay  —  a  deliberate,  strange  abnegation  and  dread 
—  of  sane  sexuality,  of  maternity  and  paternity, 
among  us,  and  in  our  literary  ideals  and  social  types 
of  men  and  women  ?  For  myself  I  welcome  any 
evidence  to  the  contrary,  or  any  evidence  that  deeper 
and  counteracting  agencies  are  at  work,  as  unspeak- 
ably precious.  I  do  not  know  where  this  evidence  is 
furnished  in  such  ample  measure  as  in  the  pages  of 
Walt  Whitman.  The  great  lesson  of  Nature,  I  take 
it,  is  that  a  sane  sensuality  must  be  preserved  at  all 
hazards,  and  this,  it  seems  to  me,  is  also  the  great  les- 
son of  his  writings.  The  point  is  fully  settled  in  him, 
that  however  they  may  have  been  held  in  abeyance, 
or  restricted  to  other  channels,  there  is  still  sap  and 
fecundity,  and  depth  of  virgin  soil  in  the  race,  suffi- 
cient to  produce  a  man  of  the  largest  mould,  and  the 
most  audacious  and  unconquerable  egoism,  and  on  a 
plane  the  last  to  be  reached  by  these  qualities ;  a  man 


232       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

of  antique  stature,  of  Greek  fibre  and  gripe,  with  sci- 
ence and  the  modern  added,  without  abating  one  jot 
or  tittle  of  his  native  force,  adhesiveness,  American- 
ism, and  democracy. 

As  I  have  already  hinted,  Whitman  has  met  with 
by  far  his  amplest  acceptance  and  appreciation  in 
Europe.  There  is  good  reason  for  this,  though  it  is 
not  what  has  been  generally  claimed,  namely,  that 
the  cultivated  classes  of  Europe  are  surfeited  with  re- 
spectability, half  dead  with  ennui  and  routine,  etc., 
and  find  an  agreeable  change  in  the  daring  unconven- 

C  o  o 

tionality  of  the  new  poet.  For  the  fact  is,  it  is  not 
the  old  and  jaded  minds  of  London,  or  Paris,  or 
Dublin,  or  Copenhagen,  that  have  acknowledged  him, 
but  the  fresh,  eager,  young  minds.  Nine  tenths  of 
his  admirers  there  are  the  sturdiest  men  in  the  fields 
of  art,  science,  and  literature. 

In  many  respects,  as  a  race,  we  Americans  have 
been  pampered  and  spoiled ;  we  have  been  brought 
up  on  sweets.  I  suppose  that,  speaking  literally,  no 
people  under  the  sun  consume  so  much  confection- 
ery, so  much  pastry  and  cake,  or  indulge  in  so  many 
gassy  and  sugared  drinks.  The  soda-fountain,  with 
its  syrups,  has  got  into  literature,  and  furnishes  the 
popular  standard  of  poetry.  The  old  heroic  stamina 
of  our  ancestors,  that  craved  the  bitter  but  nourish- 
ing home-brewed,  has  died  out,  and  in  its  place  there 
is  a  sickly  cadaverousness  that  must  be  pampered  and 
corseted.  Among  educated  people  here  there  is  a 
mania  for  the  bleached,  the   double   refined;   white 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       233 

houses,  white  china,  white  marble,  and  white  skins. 
We  take  the  bone  and  sinew  out  of  the  flour  in  order 
to  have  white  bread,  and  are  bolting  our  literature  as 
fast  as  possible. 

It  is  for  these  and  kindred  reasons  that  "Walt  Whit- 
man is  more  read  abroad  than  in  his  own  country. 
It  is  on  the  rank,  human,  and  emotional  side  —  sex, 
magnetism,  health,  physique,  etc.  —  that  he  is  so  full. 
Then  his  receptivity  and  assimilative  powers  are  enor- 
mous, and  he  demands  these  in  his  reader.  In  fact, 
his  poems  are  physiological  as  much  as  they  are  in- 
tellectual. They  radiate  from  his  entire  being,  and 
are  charged  to  repletion  with  that  blended  quality  of 
mind  and  body  —  psychic  and  physiologic  —  which 
the  living  form  and  presence  send  forth.  Never  be- 
fore in  poetry  has  the  body  received  such  ennoble- 
ment. The  great  theme  is  Identity,  and  identity 
comes  through  the  body ;  and  all  that  pertains  to  the 
body,  the  poet  teaches,  is  entailed  upon  the  spirit. 
In  his  rapt  gaze,  the  body  and  the  soul  are  one,  and 
what  debases  the  one  debases  the  other.  Hence  he 
glorifies  the  body.  Not  more  ardently  and  purely 
did  the  great  sculptors  of  antiquity  carve  it  in  the 
enduring  marble,  than  this  poet  has  celebrated  it  in 
his  masculine  and  flowing  lines.  The  bearing  of 
his  work  in  this  direction  is  invaluable.  Well  has  it 
been  said  that  the  man  or  woman  who  has  "  Leaves 
of  Grass"  for  a  daily  companion  will  be  under  the 
constant,  invisible  influence  of  sanity,  cleanliness, 
strength,  and  a  gradual  severance  from  all  that  cor- 
rupts and  makes  morbid  and  mean. 


234  THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 

In  regard  to  the  unity  and  construction  of  the 
poems,  the  reader  sooner  or  later  discovers  the  true 
solution  to  be,  that  the  dependence,  cohesion,  and 
final  reconciliation  of  the  whole  are  in  the  Person- 
ality of  the  poet  himself.  As  in  Shakespeare  every- 
thing is  strung  upon  the  plot,  the  play,  and  loses 
when  separated  from  it,  so  in  this  poet  every  line 
and  sentence  refers  to  and  necessitates  the  Person- 
ality behind  it,  and  derives  its  chief  significance  there- 
from. In  other  words,  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  is  essen- 
tially a  dramatic  poem,  a  free  representation  of  man 
in  his  relation  to  the  outward  world,  —  the  play,  the 
interchanges  between  him  and  it,  apart  from  social 
and  artificial  considerations  —  in  which  we  discern  the 
central  purpose  or  thought  to  be  for  every  man  and 
woman  his  or  her  Individuality,  and  around  that  Na- 
tionality. To  show  rather  than  to  tell,  —  to  body 
forth  as  in  a  play  how  these  arise  and  blend,  how 
the  man  is  developed  and  recruited,  his  spirit's  de- 
scent ;  how  he  walks  through  materials  absorbing  and 
conquering  them  ;  how  he  confronts  the  immensities 
of  time  and  space;  where  are  the  true  sources  of  his 
power,  the  soul's  real  riches  —  that  which  "  adheres 
and  goes  forward  and  is  not  dropped  by  death ;"  how  he 
is  all  defined  and  published  and  made  certain  through 
his  body ;  the  value  of  health  and  physique ;  the  great 
solvent,  Sympathy,  —  to  show  the  need  of  larger  and 
fresher  types  in  art  and  in  life,  and  then  how  the 
State  is  compacted,  and  how  the  democratic  idea  is 
ample  and  composite,  and  cannot  fail  us,  —  to  show 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       235 

all  this,  I  say,  not  as  in  a  lecture  or  critique,  but 
suggestively  and  inferentially,  —  to  work  it  out  freely 
and  picturesquely,  with  endless  variations,  with  per- 
son and  picture  and  parable  and  adventure,  is  the 
lesson  and  object  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass."  From  the 
first  line,  where  the  poet  says, 

"I  loafe  and  invite  my  Soul," 

to  the  last,  all  is  movement  and  fusion  —  all  is  clothed 
in  flesh  and  blood.  The  scene  changes,  the  curtain 
rises  and  falls,  but  the  theme  is  still  Man,  —  his  op- 
portunities, his  relations,  his  past,  his  future,  his  sex, 
his  pride  in  himself,  his  omnivorousness,  his  "great 
hands,"  his  yearning  heart,  his  seething  brain,  the 
abysmal  depths  that  underlie  him  and  open  from 
him,  etc.,  all  illustrated  in  the  poet's  own  character. 
Himself  is  the  chief  actor  always.  His  personality 
directly  facing  you,  and  with  its  eye  steadily  upon 
you,  runs  through  every  page,  spans  all  the  details, 
and  rounds  and  completes  them,  and  compactly  holds 
them.  This  gives  the  form  and  the  art  conception, 
and  gives  homogeneousness. 

When  Tennyson  sends  out  a  poem,  it  is  perfect, 
like  an  apple  or  a  peach  ;  slowly  wrought  out  and 
dismissed,  it  drops  from  his  boughs  holding  a  concep- 
tion or  an  idea  that  spheres  it  and  makes  it  whole.  It 
is  completed,  distinct,  and  separate,  —  might  be  his,  or 
might  be  any  man's.  It  carries  his  quality,  but  it  is 
a  thing  of  itself,  and  centres  and  depends  upon  itself. 
Whether  or  not  the  world  will  hereafter  consent,  as 


236  THE  FLIGHT    OF  THE  EAGLE. 

in  the  past,  to  call  only  beautiful  creations  of  this 
sort  poems,  remains  to  be  seen.  But  this  is  certainly 
not  what  Walt  Whitman  does,  or  aims  to  do,  except 
in  a  few  cases.  He  completes  no  poems,  apart  and 
separate  from  himself,  and  his  pages  abound  in  hints 
to  that  effect :  — 

"Let  others  finish  specimens  —  I  never  finish  specimens; 
I  shower  them  by  exhaustless  laws,  as  Nature  does,  fresh  and 
modern  continually." 

His  lines  are  pulsations,  thrills,  waves  of  force,  in- 
definite dynamics,  formless,  constantly  emanating  from 
the  living  centre,  and  they  carry  the  quality  of  the  au- 
thor's personal  presence  with  them  in  a  way  that  is 
unprecedented  in  literature. 

Occasionally  there  is  a  poem  or  a  short  piece  that 
detaches  itself  and  assumes  something  like  ejaculatory 
and  statuesque  proportion,  as  "  O  Captain,  my  Cap- 
tain," "  Pioneers,"  "  Beat,  Beat,  Drums,"  and  others 
in  "  Drum-taps ; "  but  all  the  great  poems,  like  "  Walt 
Whitman,"  "Song  of  the  Open  Road,"  "Crossing 
Brooklyn  Ferry,"  "  To  Working  Men,"  "  Sleep-chas- 
ings," etc.,  are  out-flamings,  out-rushings  of  the  pent 
fires  of  the  poet's  soul.  The  first  named  poem,  which 
is  the  seething,  dazzling  sun  of  his  subsequent  poetic 
system,  shoots  in  rapid  succession  waves  of  almost 
consuming  energy.  It  is  indeed  a  central  orb  of 
fiercest  light  and  heat,  swept  by  wild  storms  of  emo- 
tion, but  at  the  same  time  of  sane  and  beneficent  po- 
tentiality. Neither  in  it  nor  in  either  of  the  others 
is  there  the  building  up  of  a  fair  verbal  structure,  a 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       237 

symmetrical  piece  of  mechanism,  whose  last  stone  is 
implied  and  necessitated  in  the  first. 

"  The  critic's  great  error,"  says  Heine,  "  lies  in  ask- 
ing '  what  ought  the  artist  to  do  ?  *  It  would  be  far 
more  correct  to  ask,  '  What  does  the  artist  intend  ?  '  " 

It  is  probably  partly  because  his  field  is  so  large, 
his  demands  so  exacting,  his  method  so  new  (neces- 
sarily so),  and  from  the  whole  standard  of  the  poems 
being  what  I  may  call  an  astronomical  one,  that  the 
critics  complain  so  generally  of  want  of  form  in  him. 
And  the  critics  are  right  enough,  as  far  as  their  ob- 
jection goes.  There  is  no  deliberate  form  here,  any 
more  than  there  is  in  the  forces  of  nature.  Shall  we 
say,  then,  that  nothing  but  the  void  exists  ?  The 
void  is  filled  by  a  Presence.  There  is  a  controlling, 
directing,  overarching  will  in  every  page,  every  verse, 
that  there  is  no  escape  from.  Design  and  purpose, 
natural  selection,  growth,  culmination,  etc.,  are  just  as 
pronounced  as  in  any  poet. 

There  is  a  want  of  form  in  the  unfinished  statue, 
because  it  is  struggling  into  form  ;  it  is  nothing  with- 
out form ;  but  there  is  no  want  of  form  in  the  ele- 
mental laws  and  effusions  —  in  fire,  or  water,  or  rain, 
or  dew,  or  the  smell  of  the  shore,  or  the  plunging 
waves.  And  may  there  not  be  the  analogue  of  this 
in  literature  —  a  potent,  quickening,  exhilarating 
quality  in  words,  apart  from  and  without  any  consid- 
eration of  constructive  form  ?  Under  the  influence 
of  the  expansive,  creative  force  that  plays  upon  me 
from  these  pages,  like  sunlight   or  gravitation,  the 


238       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

question'of  form  never  comes  up,  because  I  do  not  for 
one  moment  escape  the  eye,  the  source  from  which 
the  power  and  action  emanate. 

I  know  that  Walt  Whitman  has  written  many  pas- 
sages with  reference  far  more  to  their  position,  in- 
terpretation, and  scanning  ages  hence,  than  for  cur- 
rent reading.  Much  of  his  material  is  too  near  us ; 
it  needs  time.  Seen  through  the  vista  of  long  years, 
perhaps  centuries,  it  will  assume  quite  different  hues. 
Perhaps  those  long  lists  of  trades,  tools,  and  occupa- 
tions, would  not  be  so  repellant  if  we  could  read 
them  as  we  read  Homer's  catalogue  of  the  ships, 
through  the  retrospect  of  ages.  They  are  justified  in 
the  poem  aside  from  their  historic  value,  because  they 
are  alive  and  full  of  action,  —  panoramas  of  the  whole 
mechanical  and  industrial  life  of  America,  north, 
east,  south,  west,  —  bits  of  scenery,  bird's-eye  views, 
glimpses  of  moving  figures,  caught  as  by  a  flash, 
characteristic  touches  in  doors  and  out,  all  passing  in 
quick  succession  before  you.  They  have  in  the  full- 
est measure  what  Lessing  demands  in  poetry,  the 
quality  of  ebbing  and  flowing  action,  as  distinct  from 
the  dead  water  of  description  —  they  are  thoroughly 
dramatic,  fused,  pliant,  and  obedient  to  the  poet's  will. 
No  glamour  is  thrown  over  them,  no  wash  of  senti- 
ment ;  and  if  they  have  not  the  charm  of  novelty  and 
distance,  why  that  is  an  accident  that  bars  them  in  a 
measure  to  us,  but  not  to  the  future. 

Very  frequently  in  these  lists  or  enumerations  of 
objects,  actions,  shows,  etc.,  there  are  sure  to  occur 
lines  of  perfect  description  :  — 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       239 

"  Where  the  heifers  browse  —  where  geese  nip  their  food  with  short 
jerks  ; 

Where  sun-down  shadows  lengthen  over  the  limitless  and  lone- 
some prairie  ; 

Where  herds  of  buffalo  make  a  crawling  spread  of  the  square 
miles  far  and  near  ; 

Where  the  splash  of  swimmers  and  divers  cools  the  warm  noon; 

Where  the  katydid  works  her  chromatic  reed  on  the  walnut-tree 
over  the  well." 

"  Spar-makers  in  the  spar-yard,  the  swarming  row  of  well-grown 
apprentices, 

The  swing  of  their  axes  on  the  square-hew'd  log,  shaping  it  to- 
ward the  shape  of  a  mast, 

The  brisk  short  crackle  of  the  steel  driven  slantingly  into  the 
pine. 

The  butter-color'd  chips  flying  off  in  great  flakes  and  slivers, 

The  limber  motion  of  the  brawny  young  arms  and  hips  in  easy 
costumes." 

"  Always  these  compact  lands  —  lands  tied  at  the  hips  with  the 
belt  stringing  the  huge  oval  lakes." 

M  Far  breath'd  land  !  Arctic  braced  !  Mexican  breez'd !  —  the  di- 
verse !  the  compact !  " 

Tried  by  the  standards  of  the  perfect  statuesque 
poems,  these  pages  will  indeed  seem  strange  enough ; 
but  viewed  as  a  part  of  the  poetic  compend  of  Amer- 
ica, the  swift  gathering  in  from  her  wide-spreading, 
multitudinous,  material  life,  of  traits  and  points  and 
suggestions  that  belong  here  and  are  characteristic, 
they  have  their  value.  The  poet  casts  his  great  seine 
into  events  and  doings  and  material  progress,  and  these 
are  some  of  the  fish,  not  all  beautiful  by  any  means, 
but  all  terribly  alive,  and  all  native  to  these  waters. 


240       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

In  the  "  Carol  of  Occupations  "  occur,  too,  those 
formidable  inventories  of  the  more  heavy  and  coarse- 
grained trades  and  tools  that  few  if  any  readers  have 
been  able  to  stand  before,  and  that  have  given  the 
scoffers  and  caricaturists  their  favorite  weapons.  If 
you  detach  a  page  of  these,  and  ask,  "  Is  it  poetry  ? 
have  the  '  hog-hook,'  the  '  killing  hammer/  '  the  cut- 
ter's cleaver,'  '  the  packer's  maul,'  etc.,  met  with  a 
change  of  heart,  and  been  converted  into  celestial  cut- 
lery ?  "  I  answer,  No,  they  are  as  barren  of  poetry  as 
a  desert  of  grass  ;  but  in  their  place  in  the  poem,  and 
in  the  collection,  they  serve  as  masses  of  shade  or 
neutral  color  in  pictures,  or  in  nature,  or  character  — 
a  negative  service,  but  still  indispensable.  The  point, 
the  moral  of  the  poem,  is  really  backed  up  and  driven 
home  by  this  list.  The  poet  is  determined  there  shall 
be  no  mistake  about  it.  He  will  not  put  in  the 
dainty  and  pretty  things  merely,  —  he  will  put  in  the 
coarse  and  common  things  also,  and  he  swells  the  list 
till  even  his  robust  muse  begins  to  look  uneasy.  Re- 
member, too,  that  Whitman  declaredly  writes  the 
lyrics  of  America,  of  the  masses,  of  democracy,  and  of 
the  practical  labor  of  mechanics,  boatmen,  and  farm- 


The  sum  of  all  known  reverence  I  add  up  in  you,  whoever  you 

are  ; 
All  doctrines,  all  politics  and  civilization,  exude  from  you  ; 
All  sculpture  and  monuments,  and  anything  inscribed  anywhere 

are  tallied  in  you; 
The  gist  of  histories  and  statistics  as  far  back  as  the  records 

reach,  is  in  you  this  hour,  and  myths  and  tales  the  same  ; 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       241 

If  you  were  not  breathing  and  walking  here,  where  would  they 

all  be  ? 
The  most  renown' d  poems  would  be  ashes,  orations  and  plays 

would  be  vacuums. 

"  All  architecture  is  what  you  do  to  it  when  you  look  upon  it; 
(Did  you  think  it  was  in  the  white  or  gray  stone  ?  or  the  lines 
of  the  arches  and  cornices  ?) 

"  All  music  is  what  awakens  from  you  when  you  are  reminded  by 

the  instruments ; 
It  is  not  the  violins  and  the  cornets  —  it  is  not  the  oboe,  nor  the 

beating  drums  —  nor  the  score  of  the  baritone  singer  singing 

his  sweet  romanza  —  nor  that  of  the  men's  chorus,  nor  that 

of  the  women's  chorus, 
It  is  nearer  and  farther  than  they." 

Out  of  this  same  spirit  of  reverence  for  man  and  all 
that  pertains  essentially  to  him,  and  the  steady  ignor- 
ing of  conventional  and  social  distinctions  and  pro- 
hibitions, and  on  the  same  plane  as  the  universal 
brotherhood  of  the  poems,  come  those  passages  in 
"  Leaves  of  Grass  "  that  have  caused  so  much  abuse 
and  fury, —  the  allusions  to  sexual  acts  and  organs, 
—  the  momentary  contemplation  of  man  as  the  per- 
petuator  of  his  species.  Many  good  judges  who  have 
followed  Whitman  thus  far,  stop  here  and  refuse 
their  concurrence.  But  if  the  poet  has  failed  in  this 
part  he  has  failed  in  the  rest.  It  is  of  a  piece  with 
the  whole.  He  has  felt  in  his  way  the  same  neces- 
sity as  that  which  makes  the  anatomist  or  physiologist 
not  pass  by,  or  neglect,  or  falsify,  the  loins  of  his 
typical  personage.  All  the  passages  and  allusions 
16 


242       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

that  come  under  this  head  have  a  scientific  coldness 
and  purity,  but  differ  from  science,  as  poetry  always 
must  differ,  in  being  alive  and  sympathetic,  instead 
of  dead  and  analytic.  There  is  nothing  of  the  for- 
bidden here,  none  of  those  sweet  morsels  that  we  love 
to  roll  under  the  tongue,  such  as  are  found  in  Byron 
and  Shakespeare,  and  even  in  austere  Dante.  If  the 
fact  is  not  lifted  up  and  redeemed  by  the  solemn  and 
far-reaching  laws  of  maternity  and  paternity,  through 
which  the  poet  alone  contemplates  it,  then  it  is  irre- 
deemable, and  one  side  of  our  nature  is  intrinsically 
vulgar  and  mean. 

Again  :  Out  of  all  the  full-grown,  first-class  poems, 
no  matter  what  their  plot  or  theme,  emerges  a  sam- 
ple of  Man,  each  after  its  kind,  its  period,  its  na- 
tionality, its  antecedents.  The  vast  and  cumbrous 
Hindu  epics  contribute  their  special  types  of  both  man 
and  woman,  impossible  except  from  far-off  Asia  and 
Asian  antiquity.  Out  of  Homer,  after  all  his  gor- 
geous action  and  events,  the  distinct  personal  identity, 
the  heroic  and  warlike  chieftain  of  Hellene  only 
permanently  remains.  In  the  same  way,  when  the 
fire  and  fervor  of  Shakespeare's  plots  and  passions 
subside,  the  special  feudal  personality,  as  lord  or 
gentleman,  still  towers  in  undying  vitality.  Even  the 
Sacred  Writings  themselves,  considered  as  the  first 
great  poems,  leave  on  record,  out  of  all  the  rest,  the 
portraiture  of  a  characteristic  Oriental  Man.  Far 
different  from  these  (and  yet  as  he  says,  "  the  same 
old  countenance  pensively  looking  forth,"  and  "  the 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       243 

same  red  running  blood"),  "  Leaves  of  Grass"  and 
"Two  Rivulets"  also  bring  their  contribution,  —  nay, 
behind  every  page  that  is  the  main  purport  —  to  out- 
line a  New  World  Man  and  a  New  World  Woman, 
modern,  complete,  democratic,  not  only  fully  and 
nobly  intellectual  and  spiritual,  but  in  the  same  meas- 
ure physical,  emotional,  and  even  fully  and  nobly 
carnal. 

An  acute  person  once  said  to  me,  "  As  I  read  and 
re-read  these  poems,  I  more  and  more  think  the  inev- 
itable result  in  time  must  be  to  produce 

'A  race  of  splendid  and  savage  old  men,'' 

of  course  dominated  by  moral  and  spiritual  laws, 
but  with  volcanoes  of  force  always  alive  beneath  the 
surface." 

And  still  again  :  One  of  the  questions  to  be  put 
to  any  poem  assuming  a  first-class  importance  among 
us  —  and  I  especially  invite  this  inquiry  toward 
"  Leaves  of  Grass  "  —  is,  how  far  is  this  work  con- 
sistent with,  and  the  outcome  of,  that  something  which 
secures  to  the  race  ascendency,  empire,  and  perpe- 
tuity ?  There  is  in  every  dominant  people  a  germ,  a 
quality,  an  expansive  force  that,  no  matter  how  it  is 
overlaid,  gives  them  their  push  and  their  hold  upon 
existence  —  writes  their  history  upou  the  earth,  and 
stamps  their  imprint  upon  the  age.  To  what  extent 
is  your  masterpiece  the  standard-bearer  of  this  quality 
—  helping  the  race  to  victory  ?  helping  me  to  be  more 
myself  than  I  otherwise  would  ? 


244       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 


III. 

Not  the  least  of  my  poet's  successes  is  in  his 
thorough  assimilation  of  the  modern  sciences,  trans- 
muting them  into  strong  poetic  nutriment,  and  the 
extent  to  which  all  his  main  poems  are  grounded  in 
the  deepest  principles  of  modern  philosophical  in- 
quiry. 

Nearly  all  the  old  literatures  may  be  said  to  have 
been  founded  upon  fable,  and  upon  a  basis  and  even 
superstructure  of  ignorance,  that,  however  charming 
it  may  be,  we  have  not  now  got,  and  could  not  keep 
if  we  had.  The  bump  of  wonder,  the  feeling  of  the 
marvelous,  a  kind  of  half  pleasing  fear,  like  that  of 
children  in  the  dark  or  in  the  woods,  were  largely 
operative  with  the  old  poets,  and  I  believe  are  neces- 
sary to  any  eminent  success  in  this  field ;  but  they 
seem  nearly  to  have  died  out  of  the  modern  mind, 
like  organs  there  is  no  longer  any  use  for.  The 
poetic  temperament  has  not  yet  adjusted  itself  to  the 
new  lights,  to  science,  and  to  the  vast  fields  and  ex- 
panses opened  up  in  the  physical  cosmos  by  astron- 
omy and  geology,  and  in  the  spiritual  or  intellectual 
world  by  the  great  German  metaphysicians.  The 
staple  of  a  large  share  of  our  poetic  literature  is  yet 
mainly  the  result  of  the  long  age  of  fable  and  myth 
that  now  lies  behind  us.  "  Leaves  of  Grass"  is,  per- 
haps, the  first  serious  and  large  attempt  at  an  expres- 
sion in  poetry  of  a  knowledge  of  the  earth  as  one  of 
the  orbs,  and  of  man  as  a  microcosm  of  the  whole, 


THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  245 

and  to  give  to  the  imagination  these  new  and  true 
fields  of  wonder  and  romance.  In  it  fable  and  su- 
perstition are  at  an  end,  priestcraft  is  at  an  end, 
skepticism  and  doubt  are  at  an  end,  with  all  the  mis- 
givings and  dark  forebodings  that  have  dogged  the 
human  mind  since  it  began  to  relax  its  hold  upon  tra- 
dition and  the  past  —  and  we  behold  man  reconciled, 
happy,  ecstatic,  full  of  reverence,  awe,  and  wonder, 
reinstated  in  Paradise  —  the  paradise  of  perfect 
knowledge  and  unrestricted  faith. 

It  needs  but  a  little  pondering  to  see  that  the  great 
poet  of  the  future  will  not  be  afraid  of  science,  but 
will  rather  seek  to  plant  his  feet  upon  it  as  upon  a 
rock.  He  knows  that  from  an  enlarged  point  of  view 
there  is  no  feud  between  Science  and  Poesy,  any 
more  than  there  is  between  Science  and  Religion,  or 
between  Science  and  Life.  He  sees  that  the  poet 
and  the  scientist  do  not  travel  opposite,  but  parallel 
roads,  that  often  approach  each  other  very  closely,  if 
they  do  not  at  times  actually  join.  The  poet  will 
always  pause  when  he  finds  himself  in  opposition  to 
science,  and  the  scientist  is  never  more  worthy  the 
name  than  when  he  escapes  from  analysis  into  syn- 
thesis, and  gives  us  living  wholes.  And  science,  in  its 
present  bold  and  receptive  mood,  may  be  said  to  be 
eminently  creative,  and  to  have  made  every  first-class 
thinker  and  every  large  worker  in  any  aesthetic  or 
spiritual  field  immeasurably  its  debtor.  It  has  dis- 
pelled many  illusions,  but  it  has  more  than  com- 
pensated the  imagination  by  the  unbounded  vistas  it 


246       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

has  opened  up  on  either  hand.  It  has  added  to  our 
knowledge,  but  it  has  added  to  our  ignorance  in  the 
same  measure  ;  the  large  circle  of  light  only  reveals 
the  larger  circle  of  darkness  that  encompasses  it,  and 
life  and  being  and  the  orbs  are  enveloped  in  a  greater 
mystery  to  the  poet  to-day  than  they  were  in  the 
times  of  Homer  or  Isaiah.  Science,  therefore,  does 
not  restrict  the  imagination,  but  often  compels  it  to 
longer  flights.  The  conception  of  the  earth  as  an 
orb  shooting  like  a  midnight  meteor  through  space, 
a  brand  cast  by  the  burning  sun  with  the  fire  at  its 
heart  still  unquenched,  the  sun  itself  shooting  and 
carrying  the  whole  train  of  worlds  with  it,  no  one 
knows  whither  —  what  a  lift  has  science  given  the 
imagination  in  this  field.  Or  the  tremendous  discov- 
ery of  the  correlation  and  conservation  of  forces,  the 
identity  and  convertibility  of  heat  and  force  and  mo- 
tion, and  that  no  ounce  of  power  is  lost,  but  forever 
passed  along,  changing  form  but  not  essence,  is  a  po- 
etic discovery  no  less  than  a  scientific  one.  The  poets 
have  always  felt  that  it  must  be  so,  and  when  the 
fact  was  authoritatively  announced  by  science,  every 
profound  poetic  mind  must  have  felt  a  thrill  of  pleas- 
ure. Or  the  nebulous  hypothesis  of  the  solar  system 
—  it  seems  the  conception  of  some  inspired  madman, 
like  William  Blake,  rather  than  the  cool  conclusion 
of  reason,  and  to  carry  its  own  justification,  as  great 
power  always  does.  Indeed,  our  interest  in  astron- 
omy and  geology  is  essentially  a  poetic  one,  —  the 
love  of  the  marvelous,  of  the  sublime,  and  of  grand 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.        247 

harmonies.  The  scientific  conception  of  the  sun  is 
strikingly  Dantesque,  and  appalls  the  imagination. 
Or  the  hell  of  fire  through  which  the  earth  has 
passed,  and  the  eeons  of  monsters  from  which  its  fair 
forms  have  emerged,  —  from  which  of  the  seven  cir- 
cles of  the  Inferno  did  the  scientist  get  his  hint  ? 
Indeed,  science  everywhere  reveals  a  carnival  of 
mightier  gods  than  those  that  cut  such  fantastic  tricks 
in  the  ancient  world.  Listen  to  Tyndall  on  light, 
or  Youmans  on  the  chemistry  of  a  sunbeam,  and  see 
how  fable  pales  its  ineffectual  fires,  and  the  boldest 
dreams  of  the  poets  are  eclipsed. 

The  vibratory  theory  of  light  and  its  identity  with 
the  laws  of  sound,  the  laws  of  the  tides  and  the  sea- 
sons, the  wonders  of  the  spectroscope,  the  theory 
of  gravitation,  of  electricity,  of  chemical  affinity,  the 
deep  beneath  deep  of  the  telescope,  the  world  within 
world  of  the  microscope,  etc.,  —  in  these  and  many 
other  fields  it  is  hard  to  tell  whether  it  is  the  sci- 
entist or  the  poet  we  are  listening  to.  What  greater 
magic  than  that  you  can  take  a  colorless  ray  of  light, 
break  it  across  a  prism,  and  catch  upon  a  screen  all 
the  divine  hues  of  the  rainbow  ? 

In  some  respects  science  has  but  followed  out  and 
confirmed  the  dim  foreshadowings  of  the  human  breast. 
Man  in  his  simplicity  has  called  the  sun  father  and 
the  earth  mother.  Science  shows  this  to  be  no  fic- 
tion, but  a  reality  ;  that  we  are  really  children  of  the 
sun,  and  that  every  heart-beat,  every  pound  of  force 
we  exert,  is  a  solar  emanation.     The  power  with 


248  THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

which  you  now  move  and  breathe  came  from  the 
sun  just  as  literally  as  the  bank-notes  in  your  pocket 
came  from  the  bank. 

The  ancients  fabled  the  earth  as  resting  upon  the 
shoulders  of  Atlas,  and  Atlas  as  standing  upon  a 
turtle  ;  but  what  the  turtle  stood  upon  was  a  puzzle. 
An  acute  person  says  that  science  has  but  changed  the 
terms  of  the  equation,  but  that  the  unknown  quan- 
tity is  the  same  as  ever.  The  earth  now  rests  upon 
the  sun  —  in  his  outstretched  palm ;  the  sun  rests 
upon  some  other  sun,  and  that  upon  some  other ;  but 
what  they  all  finally  rest  upon,  who  can  tell  ?  Well 
may  Tennyson  speak  of  the  "  fairy  tales  of  science," 
and  well  may  Walt  Whitman  say,  — 

"I  lie  abstracted,  and  hear  beautiful  tales  of  things,  and  the  rea- 
sons of  things ; 
They  are  so  beautiful,  I  nudge  myself  to  listen." 

But  making  all  due  acknowledgments  to  science, 
there  is  one  danger  attending  it  that  the  poet  can 
alone  save  us  from,  —  the  danger  that  science,  ab- 
sorbed with  its  great  problems,  will  forget  Man. 
Hence,  the  especial  office  of  the  poet  with  reference 
to  science  is  to  endow  it  with  a  human  interest.  The 
heart  has  been  disenchanted  by  having  disclosed  to  it 
blind  abstract  forces  where  it  had  enthroned  personal 
humanistic  divinities.  In  the  old  time  man  was  the 
centre  of  the  system ;  everything  was  interested  in 
him,  and  took  sides  for  or  against  him.  There  were 
nothing  but  men  and  gods  in  the  universe.  But  in 
the  results  of  science  the  world  is  more  and  more, 


THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  249 

and  man  is  less  and  less.  The  poet  must  come  to 
the  rescue,  and  place  man  again  at  the  top,  mag- 
nify him,  exalt  him,  reinforce  him,  and  match  these 
wonders  from  without  with  equal  wonders  from  with- 
in. Welcome  to  the  bard  who  is  not  appalled  by  the 
task,  and  who  can  readily  assimilate  and  turn  into 
human  emotions  these  vast  deductions  of  the  savans  ! 
The  minor  poets  do  nothing  in  this  direction  ;  only 
men  of  the  largest  calibre  and  most  heroic  fibre  are 
adequate  to  the  service.  Hence,  one  finds  in  Tenny- 
son a  vast  deal  more  science  than  he  would  at  first 
suspect ;  but  it  is  under  his  feet ;  it  is  no  longer  sci- 
ence, but  faith,  or  reverence,  or  poetic  nutriment.  It 
is  in  "  Locksley  Hall,"  "  The  Princess,"  "  In  Memo- 
riam,"  "  Maud,"  and  in  others  of  his  poems.  Here 
is  a  passage  from  "  In  Memoriam  "  :  — 

"  They  say, 
The  sordid  earth  whereon  we  tread 

"In  tracts  of  fluent  heat  began, 

And  grew  to  seeming  random  forms, 
The  seeming  prey  of  cyclic  storms, 
Till  at  the  last  arose  the  man, 

"Who  throve  and  branch'd  from  clime  to  clime, 
The  herald  of  a  higher  race, 
And  of  himself  in  higher  place, 
If  so  he  types  this  work  of  time 

"  Within  himself,  from  more  to  more ; 
Or,  crown'd  with  attributes  of  woe, 
Like  glories,  move  his  course,  and  show 
That  life  is  not  as  idle  ore, 


250  THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

"  But  iron  dug  from  central  gloom, 
And  heated  hot  with  burning  fears, 
And  dipt  in  baths  of  hissing  tears, 
And  batter' d  with  the  shocks  of  doom 

"  To  shape  and  use.    Arise  and  fly 

The  reeling  Faun,  the  sensual  feast; 
Move  upward,  working  out  the  beast, 
And  let  the  ape  and  tiger  die." 

Or  in  this  stanza  behold  how  the  science  is  disguised 
or  turned  into  the  sweetest  music  :  — 

u  Move  eastward,  happy  earth,  and  leave 

Yon  orange  sunset  waning  slow; 
From  fringes  of  the  faded  eve, 

O  happy  planet,  eastward  go ; 

Till  over  thy  dark  shoulder  glow 
Thy  silver  sister-world,  and  rise 
To  glass  herself  in  dewy  eyes 

That  watch  me  from  the  glen  below." 

A  recognition  of  the  planetary  system,  and  of  the 
great  fact  that  the  earth  moves  eastward  through  the 
heavens,  in  a  soft  and  tender  love-song  ! 

But  in  Walt  Whitman  alooe  do  we  find  the  full, 
practical  absorption  and  re-departure  therefrom,  of 
the  astounding  idea  that  the  earth  is  a  star  in  the 
heavens  like  the  rest,  and  that  man,  as  the  crown  and 
finish,  carries  in  his  moral  consciousness  the  flower, 
the  outcome  of  all  this  wide  field  of  turbulent  un- 
conscious Nature.  Of  course  in  his  handling  it  is  no 
longer  science,  or  rather,  it  is  science  dissolved  in  the 
fervent  heat  of  the  poet's  heart,  and  charged  with 
emotion.  "  The  words  of  true  poems,"  he  says,  "  are 
the   tufts   and   final    applause   of  science."     Before 


THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  251 

Darwin  or  Spencer  he   proclaimed   the    doctrine  of 
evolution :  — 

"I  am  stuccoed  with  quadrupeds  and  birds  all  over, 
And  have  distanced  what  is  behind  me  for  good  reasons, 
And  call  anything  close  again  when  I  desire  it. 

M  In  vain  the  speeding  and  shyness  ; 
In  vain  the  plutonic  rocks  send  their  old  heat  against  my  ap- 
proach ; 
In  vain  the  mastodon  retreats  beneath  his  own  powder'd  bones; 
In  vain  objects  stand  leagues  off,  and  assume  manifold  shapes  ; 
In  vain  the  ocean  settling  in  hollows,  and  the  great  monsters 
lying  low." 

In  the  following  passage  the  idea  is  more  fully 
carried  out,  and  man  is  viewed  through  a  vista  which 
science  alone  has  laid  open,  yet  how  absolutely  a 
work  of  the  creative  imagination  is  revealed  :  — 

"I  am  an  acme  of  things  accomplish'd,  and  I  am  encloser  of 
things  to  be. 
My  feet  strike  an  apex  of  the  apices  of  the  stairs  ; 
On  every  step  bunches  of  ages,  and  larger  bunches  between  the 

steps; 
All  below  duly  travel'd,  and  still  I  mount  and  mount. 

11  Rise  after  rise  bow  the  phantoms  behind  me; 
Afar  down  I  see  the  huge  first  Nothing  —  I  know  I  was  even 

there ; 
I  waited  unseen  and  always,  and  slept  through  the  lethargic 

mist, 
And  took  my  time,  and  took  no  hurt  from  the  foetid  carbon. 

"  Long  I  was  hugg'd  close  —  long  and  long, 
Immense  have  been  the  preparations  for  me, 
Faithful  and  friendly  the  arms  that  have  help'd  me, 
Cycles  ferried  my  cradle,  rowing  and  rowing  like  cheerful  boat- 
men ; 
For  room  to  me  stars  kept  aside  in  their  own  rings; 
They  sent  influences  to  look  after  what  was  to  hold  me. 


252       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

"  Before  I  was  born  out  of  my  mother,  generations  guided  me ; 
My  embryo  has  never  been  torpid  —  nothing  could  overlay  it, 
For  it  the  nebula  cohered  to  an  orb, 
The  long  slow  strata  piled  to  rest  it  on, 
Vast  vegetables  gave  it  sustenance, 

Monstrous  sauroids  transported  it  in  their  mouths,  and  depos- 
ited it  with  care ; 
All  forces  have  been  steadily  employ'd  to  complete  and  delight 

me: 
Now  on  this  spot  I  stand  with  my  robust  Soul." 

I  recall  no  single  line  of  poetry  in  the  language 
that  fills  my  imagination  like  that  beginning  the  third 
verse :  — 

"Rise  after  rise  bow  the  phantoms  behind  me." 

One  seems  to  see  those  huge  Brocken  shadows  of 
the  past  sinking  and  dropping  below  the  horizon  like 
mountain  peaks,  as  he  presses  onward  on  his  jour- 
ney. 

Akin  to  this  absorption  of  science  is  another  qual- 
ity in  my  poet  not  found  in  the  rest,  except  perhaps  a 
mere  hint  of  it  now  and  then  in  Lucretius  —  a  qual- 
ity easier  felt  than  described.  It  is  a  tidal  wave  of 
emotion  running  all  through  the  poems,  which  is  now 
and  then  crested  with  such  passages  as  this  :  — 

u  I  am  he  that  walks  with  the  tender  and  growing  night; 
I  call  to  the  earth  and  sea,  half  held  by  the  night. 

"Press  close,  bare-bosom'd  night!     Press  close,  magnetic,  nour- 
ishing night ! 
Night  of  south  winds !  night  of  the  large,  few  stars ! 
Still,  nodding  night !  mad,  naked,  summer  night. 

"  Smile,  0  voluptuous,  cool-breath'd  earth ! 
Earth  of  the  slumbering  and  liquid  trees  ; 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  253 

Earth  of   departed  sunset!     Earth  of  the  mountains,  misty 

topt ! 
Earth  of  the  vitreous  pour  of  the  full  moon,  just  tinged  with 

blue! 
Earth  of  shine  and  dark,  mottling  the  tide  of  the  river! 
Earth  of  the  limpid  gray  of  clouds,  brighter  and  clearer  for  my 

sake! 
Far-swooping,  elbow'd  earth !  rich,  apple-blossom 'd  earth ! 
Smile,  for  your  lover  comes !  " 

Professor  Clifford  calls  it  "  cosmic  emotion  "  — 
a  poetic  thrill  and  rhapsody  in  contemplating  the 
earth  as  a  whole  —  its  chemistry  and  vitality,  its 
bounty,  its  beauty,  its  power,  and  the  applicability  of 
its  laws  and  principles  to  human,  aesthetic  and  art 
products.  It  affords  the  key  to  the  theory  of  art 
upon  which  Whitman's  poems  are  projected,  and  ac- 
counts for  what  several  critics  call  their  sense  of 
magnitude  —  "  Something  of  the  vastness  of  the  suc- 
cession of  objects  in  Nature." 

"  I  swear  there  is  no  greatness  or  power  that  does  not  emulate 
those  of  the  earth ! 

I  swear  there  can  be  no  theory  of  any  account,  unless  it  cor- 
roborate the  theory  of  the  earth ! 

No  politics,  art,  religion,  behavior,  or  what  not,  is  of  account, 
unless  it  compare  with  the  amplitude  of  the  earth, 

Unless  it  face  the  exactness,  vitality,  impartiality,  rectitude  of 
the  eai"th." 

Or  again  in  his  "  Laws  for  Creation  "  :  — 

"  All  must  have  reference  to  the  ensemble  of  the  world,  and  the 
compact  truth  of  the  world; 
There  shall  be  no  subject  too  pronounced  —  All  works  shall 
illustrate  the  divine  law  of  indirections." 

Indeed,  the  earth  ever  floats  in  this  poet's  mind  as 


254  THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 

his  mightiest  symbol  —  his  type  of  completeness  and 
power.  It  is  the  armory  from  which  he  draws  his 
most  potent  weapons.  See,  especially,  "  To  the  Say- 
ers  of  Words,"  "  This  Compost,"  "  The  Song  of  the 
Open  Road,"  and  "  Pensive  on  her  Dead  gazing  I 
heard  the  Mother  of  all." 

The  poet  holds  essentially  the  same  attitude  to- 
wards cosmic  humanity,  well  illustrated  in  "Salut 
au  Monde." 

"My  spirit  has  pass'd  in  compassion  and  determination  around 

the  whole  earth  ; 
I  have  look'd  for  equals  and  lovers,  and  found  them  ready  for 

me  in  all  lands; 
I  think  some  divine  rapport  has  equalized  me  with  them. 

"  0  vapors !     I  think  I  have  risen  with  you  and  moved  away  to 
distant  continents,  and  fallen  down  there  for  reasons  ; 
I  think  I  have  blown  with  }tou,  0  winds  ; 
O  waters,  I  have  finger'd  every  shore  with  you." 

Indeed,  the  whole  book  is  leavened  with  vehement 
Comradeship.  Not  only  in  the  relations  of  individ- 
uals to  each  other  shall  loving  good- will  exist  and  be 
cultivated  —  not  only  between  the  different  towns 
and  cities,  and  all  the  States  of  this  indissoluble  com- 
pacted Union  —  but  it  shall  make  a  tie  of  fraternity 
and  fusion  holding  all  the  races  and  peoples  and  coun- 
tries of  the  whole  earth. 

Then  the  National  question.  As  Whitman's  com- 
pleted works  now  stand,  in  their  two  volumes,  it  is 
certain  they  could  only  have  grown  out  of  the  Seces- 
sion War ;  and  they  will  probably  go  to  future  ages, 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       255 

as  in  literature  the  most  characteristic  identification 
of  that  war  —  risen  from  and  portraying  it,  repre- 
senting its  sea  of  passions  and  progresses,  partaking 
of  all  its  fierce  movements  and  perturbed  emotions, 
and  yet  sinking  the  mere  military  parts  of  that  war, 
great  as  those  were,  below  and  with  matters  far 
greater,  deeper,  more  human,  more  expanding,  and 
more  enduring. 

I  must  not  close  this  paper  without  some  reference 
to  Walt  Whitman's  prose  writings,  which  are  scarcely 
less  important  than  his  poems.    Never  has  Patriotism 

—  never  has  the  antique  Love  of  Country,  with  even 
doubled  passion  and  strength,  been  more  fully  ex- 
pressed, than  in  these  contributions.  They  comprise 
two  thin  volumes  —  now  included  in  "  Two  Rivulets" 

—  called  "  Democratic  Vistas,"  and  "Memoranda  dur- 
ing the  War;"  the  former  exhibiting  the  personality 
of  the  poet  in  more  vehement  and  sweeping  action 
even  than  the  poems,  and  affording  specimens  of  soar- 
ing vaticination  and  impassioned  appeal,  impossible 
to  match  in  the  literature  of  our  time.  The  only  liv- 
ing author  suggested  is  Carlyle,  but  so  much  is  added, 
the  presence  is  so  much  more  vascular  and  human, 
and  the  whole  page  so  saturated  with  faith  and  love 
and  democracy,  that  even  the  great  Scotchman  is 
overborne.  Whitman,  too,  radiates  belief,  while  at 
the  core  of  Carlyle's  utterances  is  despair.  The  style 
here  is  eruptive  and  complex,  or  what  Jeremy  Taylor 
calls  agglomerative,  and  puts  the  Addisonian  models 
utterly  to  rout,  —  a  style  such  as   only  the   largest 


256       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

and  most  Titanic  workman  could  effectively  use.  A 
sensitive  lady  of  my  acquaintance  says  reading  the 
"  Vistas"  is  like  being  exposed  to  a  pouring  hail-storm, 
—  the  words  fairly  bruise  her  mind.  In  its  literary 
construction  the  book  is  indeed  a  shower,  or  a  suc- 
cession of  showers,  multitudinous,  wide-stretching, 
down-pouring  —  the  wrathful  bolt  and  the  quick  veins 
of  poetic  fire  lighting  up  the  page  from  time  to  time. 
I  can  easily  conceive  how  certain  minds  must  be 
swayed  and  bent  by  some  of  these  long  involved  but 
firm  and  vehement  passages.  I  cannot  deny  myself 
the  pleasure  of  quoting  one  or  two  pages.  The 
writer  is  referring  to  the  great  literary  relics  of  past 
times :  — 

"  For  us,  along  the  great  highways  of  time,  those 
monuments  stand  —  those  forms  of  majesty  and  beauty. 
For  us  those  beacons  burn  through  all  the  nights.  Un- 
known Egyptians,  graving  hieroglyphs ;  Hindus,  with 
hymn  and  apothegm  and  endless  epic ;  Hebrew  prophet, 
with  spirituality,  as  in  flames  of  lightning,  conscience  like 
red-hot  iron,  plaintive  songs  and  screams  of  vengeance 
for  tyrannies  and  enslavement ;  Christ,  with  bent  head, 
brooding  love  and  peace,  like  a  dove  ;  Greek,  creating 
eternal  shapes  of  physical  and  aesthetic  proportion  ;  Ro- 
man, lord  of  satire,  the  sword,  and  the  codex,  —  of  the 
figures,  some  far  off  and  veiled,  others  near  and  visible ; 
Dante,  stalking  with  lean  form,  nothing  but  fibre,  not  a 
grain  of  superfluous  flesh ;  Angelo,  and  the  great  paint- 
ers, architects,  musicians  ;  rich  Shakespeare,  luxuriant  as 
the  sun,  artist  and  singer  of  Feudalism  in  its  sunset,  with 
all  the  gorgeous  colors,  owner  thereof,  and  using  them  at 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       257 

will ;  —  and  so  to  such  as  German  Kant  and  Hegel,  where 
they,  though  near  us,  leaping  over  the  ages,  sit  again, 
impassive,  imperturbable,  like  the  Egyptian  gods.  Of 
these,  and  the  like  of  these,  is  it  too  much,  indeed,  to 
return  to  our  favorite  figure,  and  view  them  as  orbs,  mov- 
ing in  free  paths  in  the  spaces  of  that  other  heaven,  the 
cosmic  intellect,  the  Soul? 

' '  Ye  powerful  and  resplendent  ones !  ye  were,  in  your 
atmospheres,  grown  not  for  America,  but  rather  for  her 
foes,  the  Feudal  and  the  old  —  while  our  genius  is  demo- 
cratic and  modern.  Yet  could  ye,  indeed,  but  breathe 
your  breath  of  life  into  our  New  World's  nostrils  —  not 
to  enslave  us  as  now,  but,  for  our  needs,  to  breed  a  spirit 
like  your  own  —  perhaps  (dare  we  to  say  it?)  to  domi- 
nate, even  destroy  what  you  yourselves  have  left!  On 
your  plane,  and  no  less,  but  even  higher  and  wider,  will 
I  mete  and  measure  for  our  wants  to-day,  and  here.  I 
demand  races  of  orbic  bards,  with  unconditional,  uncom- 
promising sway.  Come  forth,  sweet  democratic  despots 
of  the  west!" 

Here  is  another  passage  of  a  political  cast,  but 
showing  the  same  great  pinions  and  lofty  flight :  — 

"It  seems  as  if  the  Almighty  had  spread  before  this 
nation  charts  of  imperial  destinies,  dazzling  as  the  sun, 
yet  with  lines  of  blood,  and  many  a  deep  intestine  dif- 
ficulty, and  human  aggregate  of  cankerous  imperfec- 
tion, —  Saying,  Lo !  the  roads,  the  only  plans  of  devel- 
opment, long,  and  varied  with  all  terrible  balks  and 
ebullitions.  You  said  in  your  soul,  I  will  be  empire  of 
empires,  overshadowing  all  else,  past  and  present,  putting 
the  history  of  Old  World  dynasties,  conquests,  behind 
me  as  of  no  account  —  making  a  new  history,  the  history 
17 


258  THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE   EAGLE. 

of  Democracy,  making  old  history  a  dwarf  —  I  alone  in- 
augurating largeness,  culminating  time.  If  these,  O  lands 
of  America,  are  indeed  the  prizes,  the  determinations  of 
your  Soul,  be  it  so.  But  behold  the  cost,  and  already 
specimens  of  the  cost.  Behold,  the  anguish  of  suspense, 
existence  itself  wavering  in  the  balance,  uncertain 
whether  to  rise  or  fall ;  already  close  behind  you  and 
around  you,  thick  winrows  of  corpses  on  battle-fields, 
countless  maimed  and  sick  in  hospitals,  treachery  among 
Generals,  folly  in  the  Executive  and  Legislative  depart- 
ments, schemers,  thieves  everywhere  —  cant,  credulity, 
make-believe  everywhere.  Thought  you  greatness  was 
to  ripen  for  you,  like  a  pear  ?  If  you  would  have  great- 
ness, know  that  you  must  conquer  it  through  ages,  cent- 
uries —  must  pay  for  it  with  a  proportionate  price.  For 
you  too,  as  for  all  lands,  the  struggle,  the  traitor,  the 
wily  person  in  office,  scrofulous  wealth,  the  surfeit  of 
prosperity,  the  demonism  of  greed,  the  hell  of  passion, 
the  decay  of  faith,  the  long  postponement,  the  fossil-like 
lethargy,  the  ceaseless  need  of  revolutions,  prophets, 
thunder-storms,  deaths,  births,  new  projections,  and  in- 
vicrorations  of  ideas  and  men." 


The  "Memoranda  during  the  War"  is  mainly  a 
record  of  personal  experiences,  nursing  the  sick  and 
wounded  soldiers  in  the  hospitals ;  most  of  it  is  in 
a  low  key,  simple,  unwrought,  like  a  diary  kept  for 
one's-self,  but  it  reveals  the  large,  tender,  sympathetic 
soul  of  the  poet,  and  puts  in  practical  form  that  un- 
precedented and  fervid  comradeship  which  is  his 
leading  element,  even  more  than  his  elaborate  works. 
It  is  printed  almost  verbatim,  just  as  the  notes  were 


THE   FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  259 

jotted  down  at  the  time  and  on  the  spot.  It  is  im- 
possible to  read  it  without  the  feeling  of  tears,  while 
there  is  elsewhere  no  such  portrayal  of  the  common 
soldier,  and  such  appreciation  of  him  as  is  contained 
in  its  pages.  It  is  heart's  blood,  every  word  of  it, 
and  along  with  "  Drum-taps  "  is  the  only  literature  of 
the  war  thus  far,  entirely  characteristic,  and  worthy 
of  serious  mention.  There  are  in  particular  two  pas- 
sages in  the  "Memoranda"  that  have  amazing  dra- 
matic power,  vividness,  and  rapid  action,  like  some 
quick  painter  covering  a  large  canvas.  I  refer  to  the 
account  of  the  assassination  of  President  Lincoln, 
and  that  of  the  scenes  in  Washington  after  the  first 
battle  of  Bull  Run.  What  may  be  called  the  mass- 
movement  of  Whitman's  prose  style,  the  rapid  mar- 
shaling and  grouping  together  of  many  facts  and 
details,  gathering  up,  and  recruiting,  and  expanding, 
as  the  sentences  move  along,  till  the  force  and  mo- 
mentum become  like  a  rolling  flood,  or  an  army  in 
echelons  on  the  charge,  is  here  displayed  with  won- 
derful effect. 

Noting  and  studying  what  forces  move  the  world, 
the  only  sane  explanation  that  comes  to  me  of  the 
fact  that  such  writing  as  these  little  volumes  contain 
has  not,  in  this  country  especially,  met  with  its  due 
recognition  and  approval,  is,  that  like  all  Whitman's 
works,  they  have  really  never  yet  been  published  at 
all,  in  the  true  sense  —  have  never  entered  the  arena 
where  the  great  laurels  are  won.  They  have  been 
printed  by  the  author,  and  a  few  readers  have  found 


260,  THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE. 

them  out,  but  to  all  intents  and  purposes  they  are 
unknown. 

I  have  not  dwelt  on  Whitman's  personal  circum- 
stances, his  age  (he  is  now,  1877,  entering  his  59th 
year),  paralysis,  seclusion,  and  the  treatment  of  him 
by  certain  portions  of  the  literary  classes,  although 
those  have  all  been  made  the  subjects  of  wide  discus- 
sion of  late,  both  in  America  and  Great  Britain,  and 
have,  I  think,  a  bearing  under  the  circumstances  on 
his  character  and  genius.  It  is  an  unwritten  tragedy 
that  will  doubtless  always  remain  unwritten.  I  will 
but  allude  to  an  eloquent  appeal  of  the  Scotch  poet, 
Robert  Buchanan,  published  in  London  in  March, 
1876,  eulogizing  and  defending  the  American  bard  in 
his  old  age,  illness,  and  poverty,  from  the  swarms  of 
maligners  who  still  continue  to  assail  him.  The  ap- 
peal has  this  fine  passage  :  — 

"  He  who  wanders  through  the  solitudes  of  far-off  Uist 
or  lonely  Donegal  may  often  behold  the  Golden  Eagle  sick 
to  death,  worn  with  age  or  famine,  or  with  both,  passing 
with  weary  waft  of  wing  from  promontory  to  promontory, 
from  peak  to  peak,  pursued  by  a  crowd  of  rooks  and 
crows,  which  fall  back  screaming  whenever  the  noble 
bird  turns  his  indignant  head,  and  which  follow  fran- 
tically once  more,  hooting  behind  him,  whenever  he  wends 
again  upon  his  way." 

Skipping  many  things  I  would  yet  like  to  touch 
upon  —  for  this  paper  is  already  too  long  —  I  will 
say  in  conclusion  that  if  any  reader  of  mine  is  moved 
by  what  I  have  here  written  to  undertake  the  peru- 


THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE.       261 

sal  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  or  the  later  volume,  "  Two 
Rivulets,"  let  me  jet  warn  him  that  he  little  suspects 
what  is  before  him.  Poetry  in  the  Virgilian,  Tenny- 
sonian,  or  Lowellian  sense,  it  certainly  is  not.  Just 
as  the  living  form  of  man  in  its  ordinary  garb  is  less 
beautiful  (yet  more  beautiful)  than  the  marble  statue ; 
just  as  the  living  woman  and  child  that  may  have  sat 
for  the  model,  is  less  beautiful  (yet  more  so)  than  one 
of  Raphael's  finest  madonnas,  —  or  just  as  a  forest  of 
trees  addresses  itself  less  directly  to  the  feeling  of 
what  is  called  art  and  form  than  the  house  or  other 
edifice  built  from  them ;  just  as  you,  and  the  whole 
spirit  of  our  current  times,  have  been  trained  to  feed 
on  and  enjoy,  not  Nature  or  Man,  or  the  aboriginal 
forces,  or  the  actual,  but  pictures,  books,  art,  and  the 
selected  and  refined — just  so  these  poems  will  doubt- 
less first  shock  and  disappoint  you.  Your  admiration 
for  the  beautiful  is  never  the  feeling  directly  and 
chiefly  addressed  in  them,  but  your  love  for  the 
breathing  flesh,  the  concrete  reality,  the  moving  forms 
and  shows  of  the  universe.  A  man  reaches  and 
moves  you,  not  an  artist.  Doubtless,  too,  a  certain 
withholding  and  repugnance  has  first  to  be  overcome, 
analogous  to  a  cold  sea  plunge — and  it  is  not  till  you 
experience  the  reaction,  the  after-glow,  and  feel  the 
swing  and  surge  of  the  strong  waves,  that  you  know 
what  Walt  Whitman's  pages  really  are.  They  don't 
give  themselves  at  first  —  like  the  real  landscape  and 
the  sea,  they  are  all  indirections.  You  may  have  to 
try  them  many  times ;  there  is  something  of  Nature's 


262       THE  FLIGHT  OF  THE  EAGLE. 

rudeness  and  forbiddingness,  not  only  at  the  first,  but 
probably  always.  But  after  you  have  mastered  them 
by  resigning  yourself  to  them,  there  is  nothing  like 
them  anywhere  in  literature  for  vital  help  and  mean- 
ing.    The  poet  says  :  — 

"The  press  of  my  foot  to  the  earth  springs  a  hundred  affections, 
That  scorn  the  best  I  can  do  to  relate  them." 

And  the  press  of  your  mind  to  these  pages  will  cer- 
tainly start  new  and  countless  problems  that  poetry 
and  art  have  never  before  touched,  and  that  afford  a 
perpetual  stimulus  and  delight. 

It  has  been  said  that  the  object  of  poetry  and  the 
higher  forms  of  literature  is  to  escape  from  the 
tyranny  of  the  real  into  the  freedom  of  the  ideal,  — 
but  what  is  the  ideal  unless  ballasted  and  weighted 
with  the  real  ?  All  these  poems  have  a  lofty  ideal 
background;  the  great  laws  and  harmonies  stretch 
unerringly  above  them,  and  give  their  vista  and  per- 
spective. It  is  because  Whitman's  ideal  is  clothed 
with  rank  materiality,  as  the  soul  is  clothed  with  the 
carnal  body,  that  his  poems  beget  such  warmth  and 
desire  in  the  mind,  and  are  the  reservoirs  of  so  much 
power.  No  one  can  feel,  more  than  I,  how  absolutely 
necessary  it  is  that  the  facts  of  nature  and  experience 
be  born  again  in  the  heart  of  the  bard,  and  receive 
the  baptism  of  the  true  fire  before  they  be  counted 
poetical ;  and  I  have  no  trouble  on  this  score  with  the 
author  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass."  He  never  fails  to  as- 
cend into  spiritual  meanings.    Indeed,  the  spirituality 


THE  FLIGHT   OF   THE  EAGLE.  263 

of  Walt  Whitman  is  the  chief  fact  after  all,  and  dom- 
inates every  page  he  has  written. 

Observe  that  this  singer  and  artist  makes  no  direct 
attempt  to  be  poetical,  any  more  than  he  does  to  be 
melodious  or  rhythmical.  He  approaches  these  quali- 
ties and  results  as  it  were  from  beneath,  and  always 
indirectly ;  they  are  drawn  to  him,  not  he  to  them, 
and  if  they  appear  absent  from  his  page  at  first  it  is 
because  we  were  looking  for  them  in  the  customary 
places  on  the  outside  where  he  never  puts  them,  and 
had  not  yet  penetrated  the  interiors.  As  many  of  the 
fowls  hide  their  eggs  by  a  sort  of  intuitive  prudery 
and  secretiveness,  he  always  half  hides,  or  more  than 
half  hides,  his  thought,  his  glow,  his  magnetism,  his 
most  golden  and  orbic  treasures. 

Finally,  as  those  men  and  women  respect  and  love 
Walt  Whitman  best  who  have  known  him  longest 
and  closest  personally,  the  same  rule  will  apply  to 
"  Leaves  of  Grass  "  and  the  later  volume,  "  Two  Riv- 
ulets." It  is  indeed  neither  the  first  surface  reading 
of  those  books,  nor  perhaps  even  the  second  or  third, 
that  will  any  more  than  prepare  the  student  for  the 
full  assimilation  of  the  poems.  Like  Nature,  and 
like  the  Sciences,  they  suggest  endless  suites  of  cham- 
bers opening  and  expanding  more  and  more,  and 
continually. 


<p 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

RENEWALS  ONLY— TEL.  NO.  642-3405 
This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 
JTCD          on  t^ie  ^ate  to  wn*cn  renewed, 
fctohej^^d  \>$$$  aregubject  to  immediate  recall. 

FEB  24  1969  7  9 

Kliw  %_} 

FtB  12  196? 

etc  519691 

3 

REC-D  UD  1 

1EC   B'69-»ftM 

WAR  0  3199 

5 

REC.CIRC.   FE 

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